On Jul 23, 12:32*pm, "Eisboch" wrote:
Just watching a local interview with the arresting officer.

There's another side to the story, folks.

Makes you wonder *who* was acting "stupidly".

Eisboch

Lifted from another forum, with credits:
--------------------------------
Mark Steyn
OC Register
July 24

By common consent, the most memorable moment of Barack Obama's
otherwise listless press conference on "health care" were his robust
remarks on the "racist" incident involving professor Henry Louis Gates
and the Cambridge police. The latter "acted stupidly," pronounced the
chief of state. The president of the United States may be reluctant to
condemn Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez or that guy in Honduras
without examining all the nuances and footnotes, but sometimes there
are outrages so heinous that even the famously nuanced must step up to
the plate and speak truth to power. And thank God the leader of the
free world had the guts to stand up and speak truth to municipal
police Sgt. James Crowley.

For everyone other than the president, what happened at professor
Gates' house is not entirely clear. The Harvard prof returned home
without his keys and, as Obama put it, "jimmied his way into the
house." A neighbor, witnessing the "break-in," called the cops, and
things, ah, escalated from there. Professor Gates is now saying that,
if Sgt. Crowley publicly apologizes for his racism, the prof will
graciously agree to "educate him about the history of racism in
America." Which is a helluva deal. I mean, Ivy League parents
remortgage their homes to pay Gates for the privilege of lecturing
their kids, and here he is offering to hector it away to some no-name
lunkhead for free.

As to the differences between the professor's and the cops' version of
events, I confess I've been wary of taking Henry Louis Gates at his
word ever since, almost two decades back, the literary scholar
compared the lyrics of the rap group 2 Live Crew to those of the Bard
of Avon. "It's like Shakespeare's 'My love is like a red, red rose,'"
he declared, authoritatively, to a court in Fort Lauderdale.

As it happens, "My luv's like a red, red rose" was written by Robbie
Burns, a couple of centuries after Shakespeare. Oh, well. 16th century
English playwright, 18th century Scottish poet: What's the diff?
Evidently being within the same quarter-millennium and right general
patch of the North-East Atlantic is close enough for a professor of
English and Afro-American Studies appearing as an expert witness in a
court case. Certainly no journalist reporting Gates' testimony was
boorish enough to point out the misattribution.

I hasten to add I have nothing against the great man. He's always
struck me as one of those faintly absurd figures in which the American
academy appears to specialize, but relatively harmless by overall
standards. And I certainly sympathize with the general proposition
that not all encounters with the constabulary go as agreeably as one
might wish. Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state
trooper, and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a "liar."
I considered my options:

Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered
into submission and possibly shot while "resisting arrest";

Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his
characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his
barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not
appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and
betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship
between law enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized
societies.

I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial
satisfaction and explaining that the trooper would be receiving
"supervisory performance-related issue-counseling," which, with any
luck, is even more ghastly than it sounds and hopefully is still
ongoing.

Professor Gates chose option a), which is just plain stupid. For one
thing, these days they have dash-cams and two-way radios and a GPS
gizmo in the sharp end of the billy club, so an awful lot of this
stuff winds up being preserved on tape, and, if you're the one a-
hootin' an' a-hollerin', it's not going to help.

In the Sixties, the great English satirist Peter Simple invented the
Prejudometer, which simply by being pointed at any individual could
calculate degrees of racism to the nearest prejudon, "the
internationally recognized scientific unit of racial prejudice."
Professor Gates seems to go around with his Prejudometer permanently
cranked up to 11: When Sgt. Crowley announced through the glass-
paneled front door that he was here to investigate a break-in, Gates
opened it up and roared back: "Why? Because I'm a black man in
America?"

Gates then told him, "I'll speak with your mama outside." Outside,
Sgt. Crowley's mama failed to show. But among his colleagues were a
black officer and a Hispanic officer. Which is an odd kind of posse
for what the Rev. Al Sharpton calls, inevitably, "the highest example
of racial profiling I have seen."

But what of our post-racial president? After noting that "'Skip' Gates
is a friend" of his, President Obama said that "there is a long
history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped
by law enforcement disproportionately." But, if they're being
"disproportionately" stopped by African American and Latino cops, does
that really fall under the category of systemic racism? Short of
dispatching one of those Uighur Muslims from China recently liberated
from Gitmo by Obama to frolic and gambol on the beaches of Bermuda,
the assembled officers were a veritable rainbow coalition. The
photograph of the arrest shows a bullet-headed black cop – Sgt. Leon
Lashley, I believe – standing in front of the porch while behind him a
handcuffed Gates yells accusations of racism. This is the pitiful
state the Bull Connors of the 21st century are reduced to, forced to
take along a squad recruited from the nearest Benetton ad when they go
out to whup some uppity Negro boy.

As professor Gates jeered at the officers, "You don't know who you're
messin' with." Did Sgt. Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did
he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I
dunno. I wasn't there. Neither was the president of the United States,
or the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Cambridge. All of
whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League
bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African American. A black
president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black
Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-
black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid
racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism
suggests that the "post-racial America" will be living with blowhard
grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.

In a fairly typical "he said/VIP said" incident, the VIP was the
author of his own misfortune but, with characteristic arrogance, chose
to ascribe it to systemic racism, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Klan,
slavery, Jefferson impregnating Sally Hemmings, etc. And so it goes,
now and forever.