Jack Cashill took unseemly pleasure in the personal problems of another human being in his March 18 WorldNetDaily column:
A surefire way to remove oneself from the short list even of Democratic vice-presidential candidates is to get caught by the police vomiting in the bathroom while your naked gay male escort is overdosing on crystal meth, surplus bags of which are strewn everywhere.
This past Saturday morning, Florida politico Andrew Gillum had a lot of splainin’ to do. Talking to the wife and kids would be hard enough. The real challenge for the famously black Gillum was explaining to his racially charged base why his “date” was white.
In 2018, the former Tallahassee mayor came within 32,000 votes of becoming the governor of Florida. Race was his ticket from the beginning of his career to the very end.
Why is Cashill so irrationally angry at Gillum and taking such perverse pleasure in his apparent downfall? He took the side of Trayvon Martin against the man who killed him, George Zimmerman. Cashill has been a longtime champion of Zimmerman, portraying him as a civil-rights martyr and Martin as a thug in training. Cashill fired up the old tropes again as an attempt to heap more scorn on Gillum:
As filmmaker Joel Gilbert documents in his film and accompanying book, “The Trayvon Hoax,” Gillum built his career by ruthlessly and dishonestly exploiting the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.
To make the gambit work, Gillum had to defame George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin, and lie about the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Gillum was always up to the task.
Said Gillum during a Democratic debate in 2018, “George Zimmerman was able to interpret the very presence of Trayvon Martin to be a threat. And because of Stand Your Ground laws, which have no place in civilized society, was able to engage him, snuff out his life and get away with it.”
As Gillum knew well, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law had nothing to do with Zimmerman whose case was a classic example of self-defense.
[…]Gillum could never admit that the wayward Martin gratuitously and viciously attacked a man half-a-foot shorter and might have killed him had not Zimmerman fired a single shot.
Gillum could never tell his supporters how Trayvon Martin’s parents split when he was 3, how the boy’s father abandoned Trayvon’s loving stepmom when Trayvon was 15, how the biological mom kicked Trayvon out of her home for fighting months before the shooting, how Trayvon’s life devolved into a maelstrom of street fighting, burglary, guns, sex and drugs.
No, Gillum could not say any of this. He lied so often and so effectively about the case a City Lab article after his primary win began, “Last night Andrew Gillum became the first African American candidate to win the Democratic Party nomination for Florida governor, and it’s not out of the question to say that he can thank Trayvon Martin for that.”
Unfortunately for Gillum, Florida’s racist “for-profit police state” chose not to arrest him on a drug charge. He doesn’t even get to be a martyr.
Joel Gilbert, of course, is the charlatan filmmaker who spread lies about Barack Obama, so there’s no reason to take him seriously on anything. Cashill does, however, because they share the same conspiracy theories.
And, thus, Cashill’s affinity for killers continues, and his callousness toward those who don’t advance his right-wing agenda is all too apparent.