A series of wildly offensive Twitter messages about Trayvon Martin was posted on the account of a former top Republican official in South Carolina. Former executive director of the South Carolina GOP Todd Kincannon apparently published disparaging remarks about Martin, whose birthday is today, on Twitter during the Super Bowl.

Here’s some of the Twitter messages he sent out:

[email protected]coreybking Hey what's the difference between Trayvon Martin and a dead baby? They're both dead, but Pepsi doesn't taste like Trayvon. — Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) February 4, 2013

This Super Bowl sucks more dick than adult Trayvon Martin would have for drug money. — Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) February 4, 2013

Kincannon refused to back down over the tweets in an interview with Huffington Post Live. "The left has decided that Trayvon Martin was just this perfect little angel," he said. "He was a thug. He tweeted about drug use. This guy, he was a criminal, and the left has decided to make him some sort of martyr. That is what I don't understand." Kincannon added that "I stand for free speech and I stand for honest speech, and I think more people need to use it."

Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a community watchdog, last year. The case sparked accusations of racial profiling and police misconduct due to the fact that Zimmerman was not arrested over the shooting until over a month passed. Zimmerman claimed that he was acting in "self-defense" and used Florida's controversial "Stand Your Ground" law to bolster that claim.

The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart took aim at the "rabid hate" directed at Martin in an opinion piece today. "That Trayvon brings out the worst in people is well known. What continues to shock me isn’t so much how widely held the negative view of him is, it is how openly people express their racism," wrote Capehart. He noted that Kincannon also sent out a tweet that said: "I agree that Trayvon Martin was a dangerous thug who needed to be put down like a rabid dog."

"Nothing we know now suggests that Trayvon 'was a dangerous thug who needed to be put down like a rabid dog,'" writes Capehart. "To think otherwise is to ascribe the worst assumptions and motives to an unarmed kid who drew the attention of a man with a gun."