The Trayvon Martin killing: Is Obama soothing tensions or stirring up trouble?

The president promises the dead black teen's parents a full investigation and, as usual, partisan ears hear Obama's words quite differently

President Obama
(Image credit: Andrew Harrer/Pool/Corbis)

On Friday, President Obama waded into the uproar over the killing of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teen shot dead by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman while walking home from buying candy at a convenience store. The shooter, George Zimmerman, hasn't been charged or arrested, and protesters blame shoddy police practices and a lax state law that allows permitted gun owners to use lethal force if they reasonably believe it will prevent death or grave injury. But Trayvon's parents should know that investigators — local, state, and federal — will consider the case "with the seriousness that it deserves," Obama said Friday, before getting more personal. "When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids... If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." (Watch the video below.) Was Obama's remark a reassuring promise of justice, or was he politicizing the tragedy?

What a shameless display of race baiting: Nobody, including Obama, knows what really happened that night in Florida, says Rick Moran at The American Thinker. "How will [Obama] look if it comes out that the shooter was justified in defending himself?" A real leader would have withheld judgment and tried to "calm a tense situation." Obama acted like a "race baiter," rushing in to politicize the death of a young black man and stoking "the fires of race hate."

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