"...vindicate his election many times over by reminding us..."

- Really?

Let me get this straight.

Obama calls a health insurance reform "news" conference, where the only news is his wading into the Gates story to defend a friend based solely on media reports; calls the police stupid; then has to arrange for a "surprise appearance" (what is, a pop concert?) to undo the damage he did... and this somehow vindicates his election??

Is there any way Jim Sleeper could set the bar any lower?

The "teachable" moment is the fact that Obama discovers, once again, that when he speaks his true thoughts they are often met with controversy and outrage.

When that happens, he runs back to pretend to be a voice of reason between two extremes.

Gates/Crowley. Alinsky/Coburn. Wright/Grandmother.

It's all posturing, on Gates, from now on.

The only problem I have with Crowley and Gates meeting with President Obama, is that, once again if you show you are an ass in public, the bigger the stink you make out of it the higher the rewards. Neither of these men's actions, during or since the incident, is worthy of a private audience with the President.

Getting Health Care Reform sausage making off the news cycle is brilliant!
What I don't understand about the Professor Gates situation is why none of the other officers involved didn't step in cool things down. Were Gates and Crowley both so intimidating?
The reason white reactionary conservative don't understand this is that "empathy" thing. Maybe there's an empathy gene!

I heard, in one interview with Crowley, his comment that Gates could have defused the situation at any time by backing off.

What I hoped to hear from his interiewer, and did not, was the logical followup: And for your part, Sgt. Crowley, once Gates was known to be in his own home, could you not have also defused the situation by simply leaving, recognizing that your job there was finished?

Of course, there will be racism apologists like "Lowlife" above, who will defend anything a cop does to a black man, no matter how tenuous the premise. They are vermin, and to be regarded with utter contempt. Their views mean nothing.

(Oh, and I am talking about Lowlife, not to him. Someone please illuminate this for him, as he is also profoundly stupid and incapable of recognizing the distinction, to say nothing of being an utter jerk and willing if not eager to leap ahead in any case.)

let's hear the tapes!!!

read the following: Gates Says 'Yes' to Beer With Crowley

gates is using the incident to promote his upcoming PBS show. pathetic!

Thanks for that reading from the New York Police officer. It pretty much confirms what I had gotten from first reading Gate's account, then the next day hearing Crowley's account on the radio. The background in police procedure clarified that part to me.

The one thing that seems clear to me is that it still ended up with two men going all testosterone on each other at the end. Gates is sensitive to racial slights, as most African-American men in America are. Anyone who is familiar with the incident a few weeks ago in Dallas where a Black football player was hurrying with his wife to go to Parkland hospital where the wife's mother was dying and ran a stop sign should recognize that police officers often don't act with good judgment. The (White) officer stopped them and simply would not let them get to the hospital in time to be there with the wife's mother died - and the whole incident was caught on the officer's video. Such incidents are a lot more common for African-American men than for White men. Obama's first public reaction reflects the quite justified African-American view of the danger of police acting arbitrarily.

On the other side, Sgt. Crowley is an experienced officer who teaches about racial profiling and no doubt has justifiable pride in his race-neutral personal behavior. More important, he knows the protocol for dealing with belligerent individuals cold. He may have even written it himself. I seriously doubt that there is any significant room for judgment in the official protocol because it is designed to limit the discretion of the perhaps 10% of officers who are in fact racist.

Then, as I understand it, there was an audience, and very likely the situation was clearly one that was going to the media. That being the case, Sgt. Crowley's best course of action was to follow the protocol to protect himself and the Cambridge Police Department.

So between them, Gates was tired, a bit ill, and primed to expect the worst from the police while Crowley no doubt expected to be attacked in the media no matter what he did. Both were angry, and neither was ready to cut the other any slack.

I don't see much chance that the incident could have worked out any way other than what it did.

It's good that America has come as far as it has since Truman integrated the military, but the movement to eliminate racism in America still has a way to go. Obama's effort to make it a teachable moment is an excellent move towards reducing the institutional racism that infused the situation, even though it appears that neither man involved was himself racist. I think the entire incident has created a lot of discussion that was badly needed.

I'm not so much concerned with the Left's "dogmatic absolutism", I'm an absolutist myself. That is, I believe there is an absolute distinction between right and wrong and I do not think that these things are relative. Discerning what is the right and the wrong in a particular situations is another matter. What I am concerned with is BOTH the Left's and the Rights stereotyping events to fit some pre-established notion they have about what goes on in the world-- to use an urbanism : how things go down .

Let us list three possible stereotyped preconceptions that were committed in this case.

1) Professor Gates, full of himself as a VIP of whom (he thinks) everyone in Cambridge knows about stereotyped the policeman as being a racist trying to malign a black man.

2) The Sergeant might have been inclined to suspect Dr. Gates as a burglar slightly more because he is black

and

3) President Obama stereotyped the whole episode as just another example of "being home while black" as some of my friends have coined it.

Of the three I think that the empirical evidence shows that stereotype 1 and 3 were active.
Of the sergeant: did he or did he not incline to believe that Dr. Gats was a burglar more because he is AA or not? It is hard to say. We cannot read into his soul. What he did overtly did not show, as far as I can tell, any bias.

I am sure that if the same thing happened to me and I started to mouth off to the investigating officer, I would probably be put in cuffs and arrested too.

So we come to what someone calls the suicidal tendency of the Left to strive for dogmatic purity, never learning the basic lesson that life is complicated and every case is unique and that to try to fit certain types of cases all into a facile box of "racism" makes things easy but it also perpetrates the distortion of facts and that turns thinking people off.

There is no magic formula that you can bandy around in every event to solve the moral/legal implications of that event. You have to learn to think on your feet and judge things as they come rather than rely on the tired old one-size-fits-all kind of thinking.

Another teachable moment infuses this context: Thou shall not squander one's cachet. There is a difference between a faithful, warm, wonderful and winning leader, and a presumptuous one. The difference is decided on an ongoing basis by us, the people. Trust is a living spirit, not a foregone conclusion. It flows between the trusted and the trusting.

In God we trust, but the half-gods get to be assessed as we go along. For my part, I like the facilitative tone, but nonetheless, difficult subtance is still left for the stakeholders to hash out in minute particulars. Tone setting is necessary, but also insufficient, and inefficient. The last thing I personally want is an "efficient governor."

I am a 4th grade barrio teacher and NCLB, taken alone, is far too efficient to grapple with complexities of educating real children for democratic participation. I want government by the People, these little kids who, the day Obama was elected, asked permission to take down Bush's picture from our classroom, and put Obama's photo up -- before the inauguration. I called for a vote. Up went the picture, and the kids drew hearts all over it. Obama is one of us, my kids decided, and president for all of us. The fine line he walks daily is both his gift and a sacred burden.

Obama presented himself as the worst fears of his critics. A guy who supports "f" the cops, defends the liberal elitist intelligentsia, and then race baits. Good grief.