Yes, Zimmerman Will Get Away With Cold-Blooded Murder

In Esquire today, John H. Richardson writes that George Zimmerman is going to be found guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Last week, Steve M. explained how Obama's going to get the blame for the reaction if Zimmerman walks.

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.

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.

 As Charlie Pierce repeatedly writes, nothing good is going to come of the Trayvon Martin case.