Michele Bachmann Tells Supporters of Trayvon Martin They’re Imagining Things

Last updated on February 7th, 2013 at 03:04 pm

Michele Bachmann tried to defend Newt Gingrich’s comments about the shooting of Trayvon Martin by accusing people of imagining what happened.

Here is the video from ABC News:

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

Transcript from This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning. Well, let’s first get a response to what David Plouffe there had to say about Speaker Gingrich’s comments on the Trayvon Martin case. What did you make of that?

BACHMANN: Well, I think what Newt Gingrich said is that race shouldn’t be a factor. All human life is valuable. And it’s interesting the second part of David Plouffe’s answer, he said the same thing. All human life is valuable.

That should be the bottom line. I’m a mother, a mother of five biological children, but also a mother of 23 great foster children. And when you’re a mother, of course, when something tragic like this happens, you want to know what the truth is, what’s the result. That’s why an investigation is so important. We have to get to the truth about what really happened, not imagine what happened, but actually get to the truth.

Bachmann was trying to defend these statements by Newt Gingrich, “What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful. It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified, no matter what the ethnic background. Is the president suggesting that, if it had been a white who’d been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense.”

The game the right is now playing is to pretend that there are no facts in the Trayvon Martin case. They want the American people to believe that the facts are unknown, and anyone who believes that an innocent young man was gunned down in cold blood is imagining things. I guess people are imagining the 911 tape. They also must be imagining the fact that an armed George Zimmerman chased down an unarmed 17 year old. It must also be a figment of the imagination that the man who authored Florida’s Stand Your Ground law has stated that it does not apply to Zimmerman.

Bachmann is correct that George Zimmerman is innocent until proven guilty in a court law, but the problem in this case is the refusal of local enforcement to involve the judicial system in the case. The people who believe that Trayvon Martin was murdered do not hold that belief due to an imaginary construct. When an armed adult chases down an unarmed teenager and shoots him to death, and there is a 9-1-1 call to prove it, imagination isn’t needed to understand the likely chain of events.

It is the height of absurdity for Bachmann to suggest that Gingrich’s comments did not have a basis in race. Newt Gingrich was insinuating that President Obama is a racist for saying that if he had a son Trayvon Martin would look like him. Would Michele Bachmann claim that people were imagining things if the roles were reversed? What if Trayvon Martin was white/Hispanic unarmed teenager and George Zimmerman was an African-American? Would Bachmann still claim that those who are calling for an investigation or an arrest are imagining things?

First, they tried to blame the victim for wearing a hoodie. Now they are claiming that it is all just your imagination. The right doesn’t care about George Zimmerman, but they certainly don’t want the American people asking questions about stand your ground laws, ALEC, and the NRA, so they are looking for any excuse to bury the reality that a teenager was gunned and nobody wants to be held responsible.



Copyright PoliticusUSA LLC 2008-2023