I noticed the other night that Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC has jumped with both feet aboard the story of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot by a "neighborhood watch" officer, apparently for the crime of being in the wrong place with Skittles and an iced tea. This does not surprise me in the least, because I was a small part of a similar story back in the late 1970's in Boston.

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The details in the new case are piling up, and they're getting more grotesque by the day. If the accounts of the cellphone calls are to be believed, Martin thought that George Zimmerman was stalking him. There's some rattling of the cage regarding Florida's idiotic "stand your ground" law, which some prosectors predicted at the time of its passage would inevitably produce something like this. The local police, who've botched this thing from minute one, are now going to have the Department Of Justice and the FBI gnawing on their ankles, to say nothing of the fact that the local cops seem to have bungled their way into the Emmett Till case of the new millennium. There will be marches and protests, and a lot of pissed off local cops doing crowd control. (Let us be clear. Some of the cops may be on Zimmerman's side but, I suspect, most of them are going to be pissed because they don't like to be in the middle of a circus caused by the deadly stupidity of a Dirty Harry wannabe.) And all because some triggerhappy local crank apparently decided that he was so threatened by Skittles and iced tea that he had no choice but to turn a public street into the OK Corral.

And, as much as it pains me to say it, the American right already has determined that the whole controversy is a subtle plot by the Kenyan Muslim black liberationist Derrick Bell-hugger to gin up racial distrust so as to guarantee his re-election as Chief Executive Shaka Zulu. And, also, to steal all the guns from white people. This story is nowhere near as sad as it's going to get. Kudos to O'Donnell for jumping on it so hard.