It appeared that the George Zimmerman trial was over. Then Barack Obama emerged from his office Friday like Punxsutawney Phil, saw his shadow, and sure enough we are going to have another six weeks of the winter of our discontent.
In Florida, meanwhile, a small group of college kids liberals in training staged a protest in the governor's office.
Liberals just won't quit -- and as long as they are pushing, we will push back.
The left is in a snit because a Hispanic man was found not guilty of a crime they claimed he perpetrated out of racial malice.
In this case they had to invent a racial category for the accused: "white Hispanic." What does that even mean? The accused had a black grandfather. Is Obama a "black Caucasian" by virtue of having a white mother?
Not long after the incident, I wrote a column for the now-defunct Florida Voices, criticizing the media's rush to judgment, and saying, The time for pontificating will come after the facts are revealed in court and the jury has rendered a verdict. Let us hope the verdict will be more fair and impartial than the media coverage.
Thankfully, it was.
The only problem is that liberals still are aggrieved, largely because the media continue to shout fire in a crowded theater.
They are displeased that the accused carried a gun (legally), and at one point he (legally) followed someone who fit the general description of people who were responsible for a rash of burglaries in the apartment complex, which they call profiling.
Critical evidence is missing. We don't know who started the confrontation or who was the aggressor.
In lieu of facts, they connected dots but evidence in the trial showed the accused had given up pursuit and it was the other man who turned and began following him.
The evidence shows that Zimmerman was on the ground being pummeled. A gun was fired and the man beating Zimmerman senseless died.
But, solely because of the dead man's race and without waiting for facts, liberals immediately took sides.
Thousands of black people are killed each year and 94 percent are killed by other black people. If the accused and deceased both had been black, it would have been just another dead black man to liberals. There would be no political gain from protesting and hand-wringing.
In his soliloquy, Obama talked of the African-American community at length.
It made me wonder: are people like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Larry Elder, Ben Carson or Herman Cain allowed to live there, or is that community segregated?
To his credit, Obama acknowledged that blacks are disproportionately perpetrators of crime. The media mostly ignored the point.
For people to whom move on is a mantra, liberals seem to be unable to do so.
Lloyd Brown was in the newspaper business nearly 50 years, beginning as a copy boy and retiring as editorial page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. After retirement he served as speech writer for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
