I’ve been saying for almost a week now that Fox News was going to use the Trayvon Martin case to race bait against its political opponents. Now, Martha MacCallum has directly made that move by hosting a debate on today’s Happening Now show questioning the reactions of black Democrats to the Trayvon Martin case. As regular readers well know, “just asking” questions is one of the notorious ways that Fox promotes its agenda.

MacCallum began by playing clips of African American lawmakers talking about Martin being racially profiled and “hunted down.” She then “asked” guest Alan Colmes whether it was “wise for Democratic lawmakers to speak this way about this story.”

Colmes said pointedly, “We should not make this a partisan issue.” As if to discount his comments, Fox played b-roll footage of African Americans protesting noisily while he talked. Their chants were audible, even as Colmes spoke.

No such distractions when guest Tucker Carlson spoke about “professional race baiters like the ones you just saw on television.” Nope. While Carlson talked, there was a graphic saying, “Police confirm George Zimmerman was ‘serving role of neighborhood watch’ when the shooting occurred.”

In his next sentence, Carlson dragged in Obama. “For the president himself to weigh in and make this a simple parable about white racism is very foolish.”

But of course, it’s always OK to “weigh in” about blacks on Fox. Carlson went on to say, “Do you really want to have a conversation about who kills who in this country?” Nice way to get in your own little gratuitous dig about African Americans, Tucker!

Predictably, MacCallum didn’t mind.

Fortunately, Colmes spoke up, questioning Carlson’s characterization of the president “weighing in about white racism.”

Of course, what Carlson was referring to was Obama’s comment that if he had had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin. Carlson now insisted that was a racial comment. Colmes made a great point in arguing that if a white president had said about a white boy who had been shot and killed, “That could have been my son,” nobody would have “said a word about it.”

To her credit, MacCallum played a clip of Obama saying that we need an investigation and that “federal, state and local” agencies should “pull together” to find out what happened. “The president was very careful,” she noted to Carlson.

Carlson stood his ground, insisting, “This is not a race case.”

So can we expect Carlson to speak out against the ways that O’Reilly and Hannity have used (and will undoubtedly continue to use) the case to race bait? Don’t hold your breath. 

What we can definitely expect is more of the same from Carlson and like-minded guests on Fox. Carlson is a Fox News contributor and editor of The Daily Caller. He said The Daily Caller has reporters in Florida and will be reporting on further developments in the case. You can best believe that Fox will welcome him back for more of this kind of talk.

Video via Mediaite.