RUSH: Ricky in Kansas City. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Mr. Limbaugh. I’ve been listening to you for a long time. First-time caller.
RUSH: Appreciate that, sir.
CALLER: I mentioned to Mr. Snerdley during the preamble there that I hadn’t ever voted in a presidential election. As a matter of fact, I’ve never even registered. But I do pay my taxes and I performed military service so I feel like I’ve done my part. You know, my wife and I have raised nine children, and, you know, if in fact this is a truly free society, here’s what I see as the fundamental issue in that Trayvon Martin case, and I haven’t heard anybody really address it from this angle. And it is that just as you and I or everyone, we have the right to walk the streets unmolested, unchallenged, unhindered. No matter where I go, because I pay taxes, my children have the right to walk the streets unmolested, unchallenged, unhindered. That’s not what happened with the Trayvon Martin case. He was in an area where someone thought he didn’t belong, and it escalated from there, where one person challenges another person’s right to walk the street unmolested, unhindered, challenged, and thus we know the result. So it’s really not an issue as much as people have made it about race and, you know, whether George Zimmerman is a “white Hispanic” and all of this, it’s simply about the mind-set of, I want to say America, that certain people don’t belong where they are and that if you sense that is the case, that someone can use extralegal measures to challenge them, molest them, or cause them to be hindered in their motion. Because the Constitution does state clearly that I have a right to be secure in my person, and I take my person everywhere I go, and Trayvon Martin took his person everywhere he went, as do you, Rush, and Mr. Snerdley and everybody else.
RUSH: Sometimes my person doesn’t go with me, Ricky.
CALLER: Well, it should. And it probably catches up with you, Rush, knowing you. But that’s really what I think — you know, people was trying to make it, you know, a stand-your-ground law and all this and that. I don’t think that has anything to do with it, and this is what concerns me is because the same thing happened over in Nazi Germany during Kristallnacht. People were suddenly denied the right to walk the streets unmolested, and the people who protested were in the minority —
RUSH: All right, now, I’ve got time dwindling and I want to comment on what you said here, and I’m gonna say a couple things that are probably gonna surprise you.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: But in the first place, you may be speaking generically, but Trayvon was not in the customary sense walking the street. He was walking in a neighborhood where the residents had been faced with a rash of burglaries and crime, and that’s why they established the Neighborhood Watch organization that they did. It’s called a gated community, but it’s not the stereotypical gated community. This is a really lower middle class neighborhood where people, they were just barely hanging on to what they’ve got and there were people making moves to steal it, and so this unfortunate circumstance happened, but here’s the thing. I, like you, I’m troubled by something here, Ricky. I’m troubled by the fact that a guy got killed and nobody is doing any time for it or being punished for it, but you know whose fault that is?
Once this case is charged — and, remember, the cops didn’t have any evidence to charge this. This is a nation of laws, and while you say we’ve all got the right to walk the streets, nevertheless something happened here. But there wasn’t any evidence for this case to be charged. Nobody, other than Zimmerman’s word, there weren’t really any witnesses, so there wasn’t any charging in this case until the civil rights coalition got in gear and pressured the local law enforcement people down there to charge and arrest for murder and manslaughter, whatever it was, and then they turned the case over to the prosecutors, and that’s where this broke down. The prosecutors failed to make the case.
The American judicial system is what it is, and it worked. There was not enough evidence to convict Zimmerman of what he was charged with. It was not that Trayvon Martin was disturbed while innocently walking the street. It was that Trayvon Martin had been manslaughtered by George Zimmerman. Okay, well, if you’re gonna charge that, if you’re gonna say that’s what happened here, then you better have evidence for it, and if you don’t and you take it to court, you better have some other way of getting the verdict that you want. They didn’t. The prosecution was inept in this case. The prosecution, you can argue about it all day long about whether the case was overcharged or whether there should have been any charges based on the absence of evidence.
There are so many circumstances here that are filled with gray area, because nobody really knows. We had a situation where nobody knows what happened other than Zimmerman. And Zimmerman told his version. Well, some people said, “I don’t believe that,” and the reasons for it then, well, ’cause he’s a “white Hispanic” and Trayvon’s black, and here come the stereotypical assumptions that people started to make. But when you strip it all away, the prosecution was unable to make the case that Zimmerman wantonly killed the guy, and I don’t know what you do beyond that other than — you know, I can understand anybody being ticked off. Here we have a 17-year-old killed, he’s dead, and at the end of the day there isn’t any punishment. But, you know, OJ got away with it. This stuff, it happens.
That’s why I think Obama entering the fray the way he did is a little irresponsible here. Because this case, you can’t blame the defense. They’ve got a client who’s charged. Their constitutional role is to defend this guy the best way they can. And their constitutional role does not say they have to prove anything. They don’t have to prove he didn’t do it. The guy’s making the accusation have to prove it. And they didn’t. And they couldn’t. Because they were looking it from the wrong angle.
All they saw was race. Because that’s what they were being forced into saying. Sorry, we can’t make that case here. They charged it wrongly, overcharged it incorrectly, and the defense, given the way the charges were made, turned out to prove he didn’t do it. To the jury, anyway. Even though that’s not what they have to do constitutionally. The defense never has to prove anything. It’s all up to the prosecution, and they didn’t make the case. And I think that’s unfortunate. If there was a case to be made here, and if there was a guilty verdict to be had, the prosecution is who blew it.
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