I saw snippets of it on Fox & Friends this morning while getting dressed. They also had the Martins and attorney Crump on in the following segment, and asked what their responses were to the various parts of the Zimmerman interview.
They were not gracious. It would not have mattered
what Zimmerman said, they would have been less than gracious.
My reaction is that Zimmerman made a huge strategic error by apologizing to the Martins for the the loss of their son. I understand what motivated him to say it, but I am very surprised that his attorney let him say it, and it makes me wonder a bit about his attorney's competence. By apologizing, Zimmerman has just established that, even if he is acquitted in the criminal trial, his supposed guilt in the civil wrongful death trial that will almost certainly follow will be that much easier to prove.
When he was asked if he regretted what he had done, he said he had no regrets.
MY reaction would have been to say that I very much regretted that Trayvon Martin, a young man who was bigger, stronger, and faster than me had assaulted me, beat the snot out of me, tried to smother me, called me a dirty name describing oedipal lust and told me I was going to die tonight, and then tried to grab for my gun,
forcing me to grab it first and use deadly force to save my own life. I would say that since the Martin family have spent so much time, effort, and money to try me outside of the courtroom, I very MUCH regretted Treyvon's actions, but not my own. My right to life was greater than his right to kill me, and he would still be alive today had he not done those things to me.
Zimmerman's problem (other than this whole case) is that he believes himself to be a nice guy and very much wants other people to think the same of him. AND, he may well indeed be a nice guy. He seems like it to me. But in his efforts to influence people to think that he is a nice guy, he is handing ammunition to the people who are trying to destroy him, and they are not going to accept that he's a nice guy and back off their pressures on him. Frankly, they want him either dead, or in prison for life.
And beyond that, they want to crush him and his family financially. I believe that, if they thought they could get away with it, they would burn his house down and kill his dog. I believe that, A) in their grief over the loss of their son, and B) the cognitive dissonance forced upon them about their parenting skills and the kind of son they raised and their fear of what that may force them to examine within themselves, they are quite beyond the reach of reason. And at the last resort, they are completely willing to play the race card against a person of mixed-race himself, because they cannot accept that their son was living out the very stereotype which causes many people to (perhaps unjustly) view the black community in a negative light. They will never back away from the race card, because its use is the last refuge of people who have nothing valid to say.
With such an unreachable set of parents, there is only ONE tactic for Zimmerman to pursue, and that is to keep reminding them (AND the listening/viewing public) at every opportunity that the young man the Martins raised so poorly was a troubled thug who assaulted someone and tried to kill him........and got himself killed in the process.
