Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough has lambasted conservative talker Sean Hannity for his comments immediately following President Barack Obama’s talk on race. I heard Hannity’s comments while driving and my reaction was: this is so typical of what is chasing many independent voters, members of increasingly important demographic groups such as Latinos and African Americans, and one-time Republicans who are not Tea Party or Rush Limbaugh fans away from the GOP.
What did Hannity say?
“Now the president’s saying Trayvon could’ve been me thirty-five years ago. This is a particularly helpful comment. Is that the president admitting that—I guess because, what, he was part of the Choom Gang and he smoked pot and he did a little blow? I’m not sure how to interpret that, because we know that Trayvon had been smoking pot that night. I’m not sure what that means.”
The other part of this tragedy is that some continue to bad mouth a dead kid — with little proof that a)the facts they are repeating are all facts or b)that even if some of them are true they had any relation to what happened when an armed George Zimmerman shot a Skittles armed Trayvon Martin.
Watch Scarborough express the dismay, anger and amazement at the “vultures” who continue to “circle around” Martin’s body. He also asks what if the same “givens” Hannity is expressing were applied to white kids.
PREDICTION: Conservative talker Mark Levin will enter this discussion with a thoughtful rebuttal — again calling Scarborough “The Morning Shmo.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.