Pirate's Cove

When asked, Obama had this to say about Trayvon Martin

Well, I’m the head of the executive branch, and the Attorney General reports to me so I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place right now.

But obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.

So I’m glad that not only is the Justice Department looking into it, I understand now that the governor of the state of Florida has formed a task force to investigate what’s taking place. I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means that examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident.

But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

Newt was not particularly happy with this response

President Obama’s remarks today about the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin drew scowls from GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich, who called them “disgraceful” and divisive.

“What the president said in a sense is disgraceful. It’s not a question of who that young man looked like,” Gingrich said on Sean Hannity’s radio show.

Gingrich said on the radio show: ”Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background. Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn’t look like him?”

He went added that it’s “just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American. It is sad for all Americans.”

Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, said: “Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

In this case, I find that I have to offer a defense of Obama, no matter how much it pains me. While I’m sure that even the Obama White House isn’t so incompetent as to offer a brief to Barack in case he was asked this question, he was answering off the cuff, and, let’s face it, Obama tends to personalize everything. Personally, I did not see him making it a racial issue; instead, he seemed to be calling for calm and to let the process work itself out. Furthermore, he wisely took no position, as that would make it impossible for Zimmerman to get a fair and impartial trial involving a fair and impartial jury. As it is, all the demonstrations, outcry, and rhetoric surrounding the case may make it impossible to get a fair and impartial trial as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

And, it is a tragedy. What we need are the facts, not the feelings. We need to know what actually happened. Why it happened. Not speculation, but cold, hard facts. Even if the supposition points to massive wrong-doing by Zimmerman, we cannot arbitrarily throw Zimmerman into jail, as Congressman Alan West supports, without the facts. We then become a frontier justice society, one where justice is based on feelings, not the rule of law. Time will provide the answer.