WILLIAM SALETAN: You Are Not Trayvon Martin: His death wasn’t about race, guns, or your pet issue. It was about misjudgment and overreaction—exactly what we’re doing now to the verdict:

It turned out I had been wrong about many things. The initial portrait of Zimmerman as a racist wasn’t just exaggerated. It was completely unsubstantiated. It’s a case study in how the same kind of bias that causes racism can cause unwarranted allegations of racism. Some of the people Zimmerman had reported as suspicious were black men, so he was a racist. Members of his family seemed racist, so he was a racist. Everybody knew he was a racist, so his recorded words were misheard as racial slurs, proving again that he was a racist.

The 911 dispatcher who spoke to Zimmerman on the fatal night didn’t tell him to stay in his car. Zimmerman said he was following a suspicious person, and the dispatcher told him, “We don’t need you do to that.” Chief prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda conceded in his closing argument that these words were ambiguous.

Read the whole thing. But remember: This was never about Zimmerman or Martin. It was about firing up Obama’s black vote, and keeping his guilty-white-liberal supporters from abandoning him over his many broken campaign promises. Remember: If the GOP wins, blacks will be gunned down in the streets and women will be turned into walking uteri!

UPDATE: Michael Graham: “Amerika” Rants Get Verdict Wrong:

Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson told me the same thing. He participated in Sunday’s march protesting Zimmerman’s acquittal. “You can shoot an unarmed black man in America and get away with it,” the councilor said.

“Really,” I replied, “so does that mean that I could shoot you and get away with it?”

Jackson insisted the case was more complicated than that. But it’s not, and that’s why many Americans are so annoyed with the hand-wringing and protests. Comedian Marlon Wayans tweeted out, “They traded us one O.J. and a Barack for a Zimmerman.” But the Martin shooting was the opposite of the O.J. case.

The evidence of O.J. Simpson’s guilt was overwhelming. The jury had to make a race-based decision to ignore the mountain of evidence and find O.J. not guilty.

In the Martin case, the prosecutors always had a tough job of overcoming Zimmerman’s self-defense claims “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So a case goes the way the facts and law indicate it’s likely to go — and this proves to Democrats that America is racist?

“USA! KKK! How many kids have you killed today?” was the chant in Providence this weekend.

See the above. It’s all agitprop for low-information voters. If it damages the social fabric, so what? Power is all about power. Our political class has no sense of responsibility or shame.