“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”

Ann Coulter has an interesting column on the George Zimmerman case — and I say “interesting” because its sole concern is to indict Trayvon Martin for crimes committed by “young black males” who aren’t him. They may not even be themselves. To wit:

A few days later, another house was burglarized. The thieves made off with jewelry and a new laptop. Roofers working across the street had seen two black teenagers near the house at the time of the robbery. When they spotted one of the teens the next day, they called the police.

This time, the roofers followed the suspect so he wouldn’t get away. The cops arrived and found the stolen laptop in his backpack. This was the same black teenager Zimmerman had seen looking in a neighbor’s window.

I understand how the roofers could recognize one of the people they saw “near the house,” and that the police could positively identify him as one of the robbers because he’s in possession of stolen property. But how exactly does Coulter know that the black teenager arrested with the laptop is the same one Zimmerman saw? Especially given that — if nothing else — this trial’s proven that George Zimmerman is utter shit at identifying and assessing the relative threat of young black males. Given that this unnamed black teen was presumably convicted on the strength of the possession charge, from a legal standpoint it’s immaterial whether Zimmerman testified against him. But given the perspective of his current defense strategy — which amounts to him having been “socialized” by young black criminals to assume that all young black males are criminals — it seems odd that Coulter would defend Zimmerman by demonstrating that his profiling is vindicated. “He may be a racist who believes all young black males are criminals,” she essentially argues, “but Trayvon Martin was exception, and as a vigorously law-abiding citizen, Zimmerman had no choice but to abide by the rule.”

And here — and the following is graphic and I advise you not to click through if such things disturb you — here is what happens when men like Zimmerman treat an “exception” like the “rule.” The defense has released countless images of a teenage Martin puffing his chest in his bathroom mirror like every other kid his age, but this is the image of Martin that matters. A young man, dead in the wet grass, his life cut short because Zimmerman mistook Skittles for a deadly weapon. The defense’s reliance on those images of Martin posing like a “thug” points to the perfidy of their logic: Zimmerman hadn’t seen those images when he started following Martin, nor did he know anything about Martin being involved with the insidious crime of enjoying marijuana. He just saw the kid who’d been in that dead body and decided he needed to be taught a lesson.

Say what you will about the legal maneuvering about lesser charges, but it’s clear that Zimmerman’s guilty of a premeditated action, and if his defense manages to convince the jury that “sensible” racial animus trumps that, we’re all the poorer for it.

UPDATE: And Zimmerman’s defense closes with what Richard Wright, in a petulant interview with the French press, called a “behold this nigger” moment: a photograph of Martin sitting shirtless on his father’s couch. It’s just like a slave auction — right down to the selling of a black body.