In a better world we should never have been subjected to the Zimmerman trial.
But politically motivated prosecutors in Florida turned a local tragedy into a race crime, and then the media turned a murder trial into a primetime soap opera.
The trial accusing George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin wasn’t about seeking justice. It was a ginned-up, politically motivated morality play presented on the national media stage.
Even the president helped with the pre-trial publicity, saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
The Zimmerman soap opera couldn’t have been written any better. Zimmerman was the perfect bad guy for a courtroom drama about race -- a “wannabe cop” packing a gun on his side.
Trayvon Martin was the perfect good guy -- the innocent victim of a racist “white Hispanic,” as the imaginative scriptwriters at The New York Times dubbed Zimmerman in their effort to create a racial narrative where there was none.
In supporting roles the soap opera featured Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, so-called black leaders who still make their livings spotting racism everywhere and inciting the black community with their hate speech.
The Zimmerman trial was an American tragedy. It had no winners.
A teenager was shot to death in the heat of a fight that never should have happened.
The young man who pulled the trigger was acquitted. But he will have to live with what he did -- and the fear that he’ll be killed by some thug in the name of “justice” -- for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, the country watched as the justice system was abused and exploited for political reasons by prosecutors whose courtroom incompetence was obvious.
Prosecutors got it wrong in the Zimmerman case. The media got it wrong -- before, during and after the trial.
In the end it was the jury of six women that got it right. Because they did their job perfectly, the justice system ultimately delivered justice.
Those women sat through every minute of the trial. Sequestered and unaware of the national attention on the case, they listened to the evidence and then weighed it and debated it among themselves without getting the “help” of TV legal experts like Jeffrey Toobin.
Then those six ordinary citizens -- unsung heroes, really -- had to decide Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence based not on racial grounds or the history of blacks being mistreated by the justice system, but on the actual evidence.
The race baiters and the media experts are still re-trying the case and desperately trying to figure out how six women on a jury could be so naïve or stupid to not see the “truth” they saw right away -- that Zimmerman was a murderer and a bigot.
For the race baiters, facts and the decision of the jury don’t matter. To them Zimmerman will always be a racist white vigilante who got away with murder.
And Trayvon will always be just an innocent victim -- a young kid in a hoodie who died simply because he was black.
The Sharptons and Piers Morgans, like the thousands who will take to the streets this weekend to protest Zimmerman’s acquittal, don’t care what that jury of women decided.
They don’t care that Zimmerman-the-racist was a cardboard character created and perpetuated by the media to heighten the tension and boost the only thing the media really care about in the end -- higher ratings.
The Zimmerman Trial may be over but the Zimmerman Soap Opera may never end. The race-baiters still have lots of work to do and money to make keeping Trayvon Martin’s tragic death alive. So do the media.
Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.