It's what Ward Churchill called "the ideology of the ideal."  Our language keeps us one or two steps removed from reality at all times.    It is the difference between observing and judging.  You are correct and the stories of the two young men are quite, quite different. But, the good man, the successful man, the one who came from an ordinary background, is the object of rage and outrage.   

Americans are trained from the moment they are born to value the idea of a thing more than the thing itself.  That is why it took more than 350 years for African Americans to break through the legal segregation and oppression that continued, despite our centuries of incessant intellectualizations about freedom and all men being equal.  We do not walk our talk, but we talk.  And I'm pretty certain that under our world "leadership" of past 65 years, what we have accomplished is to trash the planet so badly that nothing is long for this world. We don't like to look at that realistically, either.