The Worst Right-Wing Reactions to President Obama's Speech on Zimmerman Verdict

Limbaugh, Hannity, Bill-O and other right-wing white-grievance mongers are stoking racial tension for cash.

July 23, 2013 |

I was in Ireland when President Obama made his surprise 18-minute comment about the George Zimmerman verdict, so I didn’t see it. I read a wide range of reactions, but they didn’t prepare me for what he actually said. It was a sober, balanced, thoughtful and painful portrait of how race is lived by African Americans, particularly black men. I can even understand, though I don’t support, the criticism from the left: while making the powerful statement “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” the president also went out of his way to praise the judge and jury in the Zimmerman trial and to say the system worked; to acknowledge the problem of so-called “black on black” crime; and to observe that this country is getting better every generation when it comes to race, which it surely is.

On their entirely separate planet, though, the right wing race hustlers went crazy, and they aren’t shutting up. Monday night Fox’s Bill O’Reilly accused Obama himself of making life worse for African Americans, because his speech showed he had “no clue” how to combat “gangsta culture.”

An unusually crazed, agitated O’Reilly declared that the plight of black America “has nothing to do with slavery. It has everything to do with you Hollywood people and you derelict parents…Race hustlers and the grievance industry,” he went on, “have intimidated the so-called ‘conversation,’ turning any valid criticism of African-American culture into charges of racial bias,” leaving African-Americans to “fend for themselves in violent neighborhoods.” I can’t wait to hear the ignorant O’Reilly generalize more about “African American culture.”

But I agree with O’Reilly about “race hustlers and the grievance industry” being the problem here – only we define them differently. Bill-O himself is a consummate race hustler and grievance peddler, pushing the drug of racial grievance to white people, making himself rich by worsening racial tension. He’s second only to Rush Limbaugh in terms of spewing ignorance to a vast, frightened audience.

Limbaugh confessed to almost losing it on his show Monday over Obama’s speech – of course he loses it every day, he just doesn’t admit it; he really lost it a long, long time ago. On his Monday show he spewed:

Obama and [Rev. Jesse] Jackson and [Rev Al] Sharpton have the same objective, same mind-set, same cultural references, same views of America….Obama is grievance politics, and the primary reason for that grievance is race. It’s in everything that he’s done. It’s in every policy. It’s in almost every speech.

And Limbaugh, like O’Reilly, is fed up with people whining about slavery. “It’s preposterous that whites are blamed for slavery when they’ve done more to end slavery than any other race,” he declared. The radio bully may be hustling for a spot on Sen. Rand Paul’s staff because that’s essentially the point “Southern Avenger” Jack Hunter made about whites and slavery, in a CD obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Hunter resigned, so maybe Rush is getting restless, or is feeling the pinch of his advertiser boycott, and wants Paul’s social media director job.

Sean Hannity may be the worst of all, using the president’s saying he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago to smear both Martin and Obama with drug charges. “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 because we know that Trayvon had been smoking pot that night.”