John Cole is making a lot of sense:
So the jury has been selected in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin murder case, and there is simply no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman will be acquitted. Sorry, but I just do not see Zimmerman getting convicted for killing a black dude in Florida.I agree that Zimmerman is very likely to be acquitted -- there'll be too many insinuations about Trayvon Martin and the sequence of events that night, and there's too much of a presumption in this country that a light-skinned man has the right to do anything he wants with a gun, especially when he encounters someone darker-skinned.
At any rate, we all know how this will play out. He'll get acquitted, there will be civil unrest, the usual suspects will show up and there will be marches and counter-marches, and then, of course, because he is black and supposed to heal several centuries of racial wounds, our failed media experiment will demand that Obama make peace for America and "seriously" address racial issues....
Here's the pool. Who will be the media assholes demanding Obama get involved in this (because, you know, he is black). Or who will say his was a failed Presidency because there are still racist peckerneck douchebags still running around half the country? Maureen Dowd? The Politico? Tapper? Harwood? Cilizza? Noonan? Fournier? Red State? National Review? ...
And I do worry that there'll be protests that don't stay peaceful -- please, folks, keep a cool head, and start preparing to be let down now.
I don't really think the media's going to expect Obama to dispel any racial tension if all this happens. The media hates Obama now. Beltway journalists think he's utterly ineffectual. (He's given them some reason to believe that, admittedly, but they all downplay the degree to which Republicans have made it their life's work to prevent him from governing.) On this subject, the press will just want him to go away.
Which gets us back to the early days of this story. TV news is going to play that "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon" clip over and over and over again -- as if that's what made this incident into a big story. The press will minimize the efforts by anti-racist and progressive groups to force this story onto the agenda. (The press is very good at pretending that progressive activism doesn't exist.) The implication is going to be that we could have all just ignored this if Obama hadn't opened his big yap and played the race card. (And yes, I'm talking about the so-called liberal media, very much including Dowd, Politico, Tapper, Harwood, et cetera.)
The message is going to be (a) Obama failed us by not eliminating racism and (b) Obama failed us by bringing up the fact that racism hasn't been eliminated. He should have just somehow solved racism, overnight, while we were sleeping, without disturbing us or nudging our consciences or otherwise making us uncomfortable in any way. He was just supposed to spread some magic tolerance dust and make all the bad stuff go away.
