I know you think you’re supporting “innocent until proven guilty” in your defense of George. I know you think the “left has gone crazy” defending George. Would it surprise you we feel the same about the right “going crazy: making excuses and defending him?”
 Let’s start with this: I think by now any sane person realizes that George Zimmerman is a man with severe issues: issues that will keep cropping up.
  Some think he’s racist.
 I don’t. My guess is given the same conditions, given a white teen trying to stand his ground too, given reports of someone like him robbing houses, the results might have been the same. Would the police’s response and how the courts, and the public, view it all been quite different? I suspect so. But that speculation is pretty much pointless now, and obscures the points I’m trying to make here about you, the right, the left and George.
  Besides, I think there were bigger reasons why Zimmerman is the way he is, why he keeps popping up in the news.
 I know you think it’s the media’s fault, or possibly the fault of the women as one poster argued with me suggested… (Really? All three are “lunatics?” Really?) …or he’s “under so much pressure.”
 You would think being found not guilty as charged would have helped relieve that pressure, but apparently it’s following him around like some attention seeking golem. Let’s blame the golem. Couldn’t have anything to do with his actions, right?
 I’m waiting for the apologists to use my fanciful golem suggestion, maybe a golem conjured up by the supposedly “liberal” press.
 Ironically the day before the latest kerfuffle I wondered, “Gee, what happened to George? Guess he has decided to lay low.”
 The next day I could have quoted another George, “Oh, Myyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
 The media didn’t start the fight with his girlfriend, smash a table, point a gun and threaten, or say, “That’s exactly what I need a gun for, people like you!”
 I know, I know: “innocent until proven guilty,” though sometimes I wonder if partisans only reserve that for “their” kind of people.
 I know he claims it was the other way around. I also know he was cited for claiming he had less money for his defense than he had. He also claimed he stayed in his truck and Trayvon dragged him out of it… until he that changed too. George has “claimed” a lot of things. And the apologists have followed right along, even as he jumps to the next version.
 Anyone else see a pattern here?
 Long before Trayvon George was accused of threatening and pushing around a woman and he fought with an officer in that case. The excuses of “pressure,” the “media,” or those liberals who have “gone crazy” mean squat here because he was “a nobody” at the time, to use a term my counterpart at on Facebook used to refer to him. But every time he pops up in the news with the same old same old we get the same old same old from the apologists. Never anything George did. Anything he says must be treated as gospel.
 Anyone seeing a pattern here?
 Then his wife divorced him and, accused him of what? And the apologists went right back to…
 Anyone see a pattern here?
 Now let’s add on playing with a gun in front of an officer after being stopped in Texas, bragging about who he was to an officer before he even got out of Florida. When we pointed these out, the cries of everyone else is to blame, whatever George claims is true, return.
 Uh, pattern?
 Well, more likely than any of those rationalizations: George is most likely a control freak with emotional issues that might, and have, gotten him in a lot of trouble. While they’re probably not helping, it’s certainly not “liberals,” or “the media,” causing this. George is causing this. Good old fashioned conservative individual, personal responsibility applies. Something George, and his defenders, chuck when it comes to his antics and continual excuses.In the latest he reminds me of the school kid who points at someone else and says, “No, SHE did it.”
 And I suspect, eventually he will wind up in prison on a less temporary basis, despite authorities who keep giving him breaks. George simply can’t help, can’t control, himself.
 But what of this “liberals going crazy” claim? Well, every time he pops up like a whack-a-mole: bringing attention to himself, I think liberals are reminded of how his court case went. I’m about to let you in on a secret that may help you understand this “going crazy” phenomenon you claim to have observed. I doubt many on the left realize one of the lesser reason they, as you phrased it, “Go crazy.”
 I really think the left looks at how we are demonized. They look at Oklahoma City, Knoxville, clinic murders, gays nailed to a fence in Texas or dragged behind a car… and then look at Stand Your Ground where the perception is if you feel someone is scary, threatening, the you can kill them.
 I know that’s an over simplification of the law, but do you understand the connection? When the answer to shootings is always more guns and those guns can be used by anyone you might feel threatened by, well we’ve also noticed how it is claimed that Obama, the left, the gays, the atheists, the secular humanists, women in the military… on and on… are supposedly out to destroy, or will destroy, the country.
  What path do you think we might consider SYG is really pointing down? All it would take is a more “liberal” interpretation to expand “hunting season,” and if we are to believe the comments of those who blame liberals, groups like black or immigrants, those even close to certain clinics: they would welcome, even push, for that expansion.
 And it doesn’t help that the same prosecutor who lost the Zimmerman case also won a case against a black woman who shot into a wall to “stand” her “ground” against her husband. A husband who had beat her damn near to death before and was about to beat her again. The unevenness of the application of SYG reinforces the fears, the angst, the supposed “crazy” on the left. George Zimmerman and Marissa Alexander are symbols, poster guy and gal, for that to the left.



 Simply put I think you’re wrong when it comes to George, but time will tell. I just hope someone else doesn’t get killed due to him getting so many breaks. Can we please stop automatically making excuses and making up scenarios why he might not have any responsibility for being in the same situation again and again?
 The right is a movement that claims to believe in personal responsibility. When I was an activist for the right in the 60s and 70s we never, ever, would have kept making excuses for someone like George. Like Bill and Jim Buckley told Nixon it was time to go, it’s time the right starts telling George he needs to start taking personal responsibility, and stop doing what George does every time: try to find every, and any, possible reason and excuse for any “awkward” situation George obviously played at least some part in.
 And no matter what happens with SYG maybe altering the rhetoric might help a tad? If you’re going to accuse a dead teen of being a homicidal racist, punk, thug, deserving of being killed, you might want to check your claim of being believing in “innocent until proven guilty?”
 Makes one think your idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is only reserved for people who agree with you, certainly not for those easy to rhetorically molest because they are dead.
 Just a few suggestions from a former member of, and activist for, the Conservative Party in New York State.

                                                     -30-

Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 30 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.

©Copyright 2013
Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
All Rights Reserved