Tucker Carlson calls black lawmakers 'professional race-baiters'

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson says that "professional race-baiters" like some African-American lawmakers and President Barack Obama are making a mistake by injecting race into the death of Trayvon Martin.

Fox News host Martha MacCallum played clips of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) and Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) speaking out about racial profiling at a press conference on Tuesday before asking if Democratic lawmakers had gone too far.

"I used to cover crime," Carlson explained. "And the one thing you learn in covering specific crimes is you really don't know as much as you think you do."

"And so for people to weigh in, for professional race-baiters like the ones you just saw on television, and for the president himself to weigh in and make this a simple parable about white racism is very foolish because it may not turn out to bolster that accusation, for one. And for another, do you really want to have a conversation about who kills who in this country? Do you want to look at the statistics? This is not a conversation that political figures should be weighing in on at all."

Fox News contributor Alan Colmes interrupted to ask when President Barack Obama had weighed in and made the case about "white racism."

"The president stood up and said, this boy looks like my son would look," Carlson replied. "And that is clearly making the case that this boy was killed because the way he looks, and we don't know that all."

"Tucker, if we had a white president and a white boy had been shot and a white president had said that could have been my son, nobody would have said a word about it," Colmes pointed out. "The fact that Obama said this -- he took the exact right tone. He wasn't playing the race card at all."

"Alan, that's ridiculous," Carlson disagreed. "People are shot to death every day, tragically, and the president doesn't weigh in on it. ... There's a reason that the Congressional Black Caucus and the completely irresponsible congresswoman from Florida you just saw are weighing in on this, as is Al Sharpton as is the entire anchor lineups of a couple other cable networks, because they are making this into a case based on race."

"You've got conservative websites making it a case based on race when you show a false picture," Colmes shot back, referring to a fake photo of Trayvon Martin posted by some right-leaning publications like Michelle Malkin's Twitchy.

"I don't know what you are talking about," Carlson declared. "My site, of all of them, has actual reporters on here trying to uncover facts, which we are doing."

Some of the "facts" published by Carlson’s The Daily Caller included 152 pages of deleted tweets that the publication claimed were from a locked Twitter account supposedly belonging to Martin (under the name “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA”), including a photo said to be of the teen sporting gold teeth. Martin's family has not verified the photo, and other conservative news outlets have previously published supposed pictures of Martin that turned out to be other people.

Watch this video from Fox News' America's Newsroom, broadcast March 28, 2012.

(H/T: Mediaite)