Rush Limbaugh hit out at President Obama's reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin on Monday, alleging that the president was using the teenager's death as a "political opportunity."
Martin was unarmed when he was shot dead by self-appointed neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. His death has sparked outrage across the country. Obama weighed in on the tragedy last week, saying, "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
On Monday, Limbaugh expressed his horror at the comments. "It is the least important thing, what the kid looks like," he said. "This poor kid was shot and the President of the United States only public reaction [was] ‘Mind you, if I had a son he’d look like that’? For what purpose does one say that? And what must you be thinking about this situation to think that and then say it?”
The conservative radio host was reacting to a National Review piece by Jay Nordlinger, which he read aloud.
In it, Nordlinger alleged that liberals are obsessed with race. "What if the victim had been of Chinese ancestry, or a freckly red-headed Irish-American kid, or a kinky-haired Jewish piano student?" he wrote. "What Barack Obama’s offspring would look like: Isn’t that the least important thing about the Trayvon Martin case?"
Limbaugh agreed with that point, insisting that the teenager's death was not about race. He tore into those who think otherwise.
"Sorry, [the] last thing that ever occurs to me when someone gets shot... is that they look like me," he said. "It doesn't compute, but the left, they see things like this purely as surface matters. These are political opportunities for these people. That's the sad thing about this."
"Here you have the death of an American citizen that seems a political opportunity," he added. "There’s no humanity in that."
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