Some conservatives have a message for President Obama after he got personal Friday while discussing Trayvon Martin's shooting death: We're personally offended.
Several right-leaning pundits and politicians are blasting the commander-in-chief's remarks about the killing of the unarmed black teen, going so far as to say the President is race-baiting.
Obama declared Friday that if he had a son, he'd look like 17-year-old Trayvon, who was shot and killed last month by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The shooting has sparked massive protests across the country, in addition to a furor over race and justice.
On Friday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Obama and his comments were "disgraceful."
"It's not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period," the ex-House Speaker ranted during a radio interview with Sean Hannity.
"Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn't look like him? That's just nonsense dividing this country up….Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong," he added.
Obama said the boy's parents "are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves," adding, "We're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened."
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin echoed Gingrich's sentiment, writing on her blog that Obama is "all too willing to pour gas on the fire."
"What do Trayvon's race and looks have to do with anything? The political opportunism undercuts the very 'seriousness' Obama purports to display," she added.
Rick Moran, writing for "The American Thinker," argued nobody, including the president, really knows what happened the night Martin was killed.
"Obama leaves no doubt that he has taken sides on the issue-something a president should only do when the facts are clear and incontrovertible," he said, branding the president a "race baiter."
Trayvon was returning home from a convenience store Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla. when neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman started following the teen, telling police dispatchers that he looked suspicious.
Zimmerman claimed he fired in self-defense after Martin jumped him. He has not been charged and has kept out of the public eye since the incident.
Several conservatives, including Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have spoken in support of a federal probe of the incident.
Shortly after Obama's remarks on the shooting, Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney called for a "thorough investigation" into Martin's death.
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