Fox News continues to demonize Trayvon Martin and President Obama by claiming that Obama is using the shooting to provoke a racial confrontation.
Here is the video from Media Matters:
Here is the transcript of Sean Hannity and Dick Morris:
Morris: He can’t give Spike Lee’s money back, because his whole goal is to provoke a racial confrontation. That’s why he intervened in this.
Hannity: Whoa, stop for a second. Are you saying the president’s goal is to spark a racial confrontation?
Morris: I don’t mean in the streets of Florida. I’m sorry. I misstated that. Take it back. The president’s goal is to heighten African American turnout by stoking a feeling of victimization in the African American community.
Hannity: It’s another way to say he is trying to energize his base…how do you think he’s doing it, by the comments he made about Trayvon Martin looking like him?
Morris: Yes. Exactly, I think what he is trying to do is rekindle the sense of black victimization which would impel an increased turnout, and I think that he’s also trying to do that with Latinos. That’s why he is changing the immigration unilaterally, implementing the Dream Act unilaterally in effect.
According to Fox News, the Trayvon Martin shooting is being made racial by President Obama who is using the killing of a seventeen year old kid to increase African American turnout for the general election. Of course, this is exactly what President Obama is not doing. Obama’s intervention has been limited to a statement of sympathy for Trayvon Martin’s family, and a plea for people to let the investigation play out so that the facts will be known.
What is really going on here is that the right is using the Trayvon Martin shooting and Obama’s comments as a racial wedge issue and as a reminder to white voters that they shouldn’t trust the African American president. Terrified conservatives are using the killing of Trayvon Martin in an attempt to reopen up the nation’s racial wounds for political gain. The hypocrisy of the right is stunning when you consider that they has said nothing about the president making similar comments about the murder of Melissa Jenkins.
The right is so terrified that African Americans will show up to vote in November that they feel the need to turn the president’s simple message of sympathy into an ugly race based political attack. President Obama doesn’t have to worry about African Americans showing up on Election Day. Polling shows that even when times have been their toughest during his first term, African Americans and Latinos have been very loyal to this president.
Morris’s whole theory is based on the fraudulent premise that African Americans and Latinos need extra motivation to come out and support this president. President Obama will certainly ask for their votes, but it has been white progressives who have been hopping off the Obama bandwagon more than women, Latinos, and African-Americans.
Hannity and Morris were doing their best to terrify aging white conservatives into coming out and voting for Mitt Romney. Just as George W. Bush terrified his supporters by raising the terror alert level before the 2004 election, people like Sean Hannity and Dick Morris are blowing their racial dog whistles in an attempt to get Republicans to the polls.
The right will use anything to attack Obama. Even the senseless killing of a teenage boy is not off limits. They are scared, desperate, and appealing to our darkest demons, but as 2008 demonstrated, we should never doubt the power of America’s better angels to prevail.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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