Alinsky

Over at PJMedia, Roger L. Simon has a piece with the catchy title “Obama Big Loser in Zimmerman Trial.” Simon writes:

By injecting himself in a minor Florida criminal case by implying Martin could be his son, the president of the United States — a onetime law lecturer, of all things — disgraced himself and his office, made a mockery of our legal system and exacerbated racial tensions in our country, making them worse than they have been in years. This is the work of a reactionary, someone who consciously/unconsciously wants to push our nation back to the 1950s.
It is also the work of a narcissist who thinks of himself first, of his image, not of black, white or any other kind of people. It’s no accident that race relations in our country have gone backwards during his stewardship.

It’s a clever premise, and in ideal world, it should be true, but in the world we live in, the one where Obama got re-elected, I suspect it doesn’t hurt Obama one bit.

These are just a few quick thoughts on my part, so they won’t be fully fleshed-out, but as I see it, Obama got most of what he wanted from the Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman wasn’t convicted, but as far as Obama and Holder are concerned, that only would have been the icing on their toxic cake.

As suggested in this great article by Karen McQuillan at American Thinker, Obama and Holder are masters at using race and division to advance their agenda. And when this incident occurred, Obama was showing some softening of support among black voters who were not faring well in the Obama economy. McQuillan writes:

Once the president of the United States weighed in, Zimmerman had a target on his back. An ounce of election advantage to our privileged, Ivy League president versus the ruination of a Hispanic man’s life — it was an easy choice for Obama. Obama’s great appeal to voters in 2008 was his self-presentation as a black man without animus or grievance, eager to move the country beyond divisions of all sorts — black and white, red and blue. In reality, Obama is obsessed with divisions — race, class, gender — and is expert at fueling war between us, to his political advantage.
Obama has used accusations of racism before, to rally his troops and attack his political opponents. Opposition to ObamaCare? Racist. Opposition to big government? Racist. His core liberal supporters like this stuff, and the other voters give him a pass on this, as on everything. The election analysts were predicting that even black turnout could dip in 2012. Obama moved from racial slurs on opposition groups to attacking a particular individual citizen. Zimmerman was sacrificed.

In other words, by weighing in on the Zimmerman case, Obama shored up support among his base and among the black activist class, and thereby helped pave the way to his re-election by those groups. Not only did he help win support among those voting blocs, he further poisoned the well for race relations in this country, and he added still more fuel to the fire behind his anti-gun agenda.

Now you may think I’m being too clever by half by imputing those kinds of motives to Obama and Holder, but simply look at his statement about the verdict:

The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy. Not just for his family, or for any one community, but for America. I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son. And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities. We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis. We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this. As citizens, that’s a job for all of us. That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.

Now while on the surface it looks like he is calling for “calm,” and for respect for the rule of law, he’s doing so in the context of his (and Holder’s) earlier statements about race and “gun violence,” effectively giving one message to his supporters and sympathizers, and another message to everyone else. It is classic leftist misdirection.

At the link above, there’s also a statement from Holder’s Justice Department saying that the FBI and federal prosecutors are weighing options for federal charges against Zimmerman. Translation: this isn’t over, as long as Obama and Holder believe they can continue to profit from racial demagoguery.

In one of the comments on my last post, our regular commenter Heliotrope provided a skillful analysis of Al Sharpton’s statement about the verdict, relating it back to Alinsky’s rules. Heliotrope observes:

Libtards lust for power in order to control the sheeple according to their current, faddish view of “correctness.” They are prideful and lash out with the politics of personal destruction against those who stand in their way. Their wrath is both verbalized and implanted by way of insidious actions meant to undermine their opposition. They have lying tongues. They scheme and devise wicked plots. They sow discord. They plant festering mischief. They twist the context to fit their version of the truth and justify their lies. They refuse to practice circumspection and correct their errors in any sense of obedience to promoting a better solution.

I’ve seen a lot of those behaviors in the reactions to the verdict I’ve been reading by various Obama supporters today. There are lots of calls, a la Obama, for “calm reflection,” but, in the minds of the Obama supporters weighing in on this case, none of those reflections are to start from the premise that Angela Corey and the prosecutors in Florida had a weak case to begin with–and that they lost because they failed miserably in presenting the case in a way that made any of the charges stick. None of those reflections are to start from the premise that perhaps Zimmerman had a right to have a weapon with him and to use it to fight back when he was knocked down and attacked.