Must Read! ... "A Beer with Obama"

By J. Thomas Duffy

John Kenney, over at The New Yorker, has a most humorous post up riffing on last night's beer-and-pony show.

Here's a snip:

"A Beer with Obama"

The Oval Office. Late. President Obama sits across from Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Officer James Crowley, who share a couch. They sit amidst several empty beer bottles. No one’s wearing shoes.

[snip]

OBAMA: I like giving speeches. I like press conferences.

CROWLEY: You give a lot of press conferences. Maybe, like, too many?

GATES: I think he’s right. Maybe don’t give so many.

OBAMA: But you should see the speeches I have lined up. They’re all so…emotional. I’ve got a new one on infrastructure that quotes Rosa Parks for no reason. But it makes you cry.

There's much more, so go read John Kenney's "A Beer with Obama"... It's hysterical!



(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

World's dumbest op-ed

By Carl

And considering it's published in The Wall Street Journal, that's a mighty large field to beat out! Meet Thomas Franks...

The essential point about Gates-gate, or the tempest over last week’s arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is this: Most liberal commentary on the subject has taken race as its theme. Conservative commentators, by contrast, have furiously hit the class button.

Liberals, by and large, immediately plugged the event into their unfair-racial-profiling template, and proceeded to call for blacks and whites to “listen to each other’s narratives” and other such anodyne niceties even after it started to seem that police racism was probably not what caused the incident.

Conservatives, meanwhile, were following their own “narrative,” the one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding “liberal elite.” Commentators on the right zeroed in on the fact that Mr. Gates is an “Ivy League big shot,” a “limousine liberal,” and a star professor at Harvard, an institution they regard with special loathing. They pointed out that Mr. Gates allegedly addressed the cop with that deathless snob phrase, “you don’t know who you’re messing with”; they reminded us that Cambridge, Mass., is home to a particularly obnoxious combination of left-wing orthodoxy and upper-class entitlement; and they boiled over Mr. Gates’s demand that the officer “beg my forgiveness.”

OK, so far, that's not a bad assessment of the situation. Although I might quibble with the terms "most," certainly the loudest and most public voices have focused on those two issues. And now, for the brain fart:

Conservatives won this round in the culture wars, not merely because most of the facts broke their way, but because their grievance is one that a certain species of liberal never seems to grasp. Whether the issue is abortion, evolution or recycling, these liberal patricians are forever astonished to discover that the professions and institutions and attitudes that they revere are seen by others as arrogance and affectation.

The, uh, facts broke their way? Honeychild, the facts most certainly broke against the arresting officer and one wonders exactly why the conservatives in this country, the alleged bastion of individual rights and freedoms, aren't taking up Gates' cause.

After all, if he had been arrested for brandishing a weapon at a police invasion of his premises and assault on both his private property and his person, it would be Ruby Ridge all over again!

Oh. Wait. Randy Weaver was white. It's different for white people shooting at Federal agents. I forgot.

The facts, Mr. Frank, are that the originating 911 call made no mention of the suspect's race, except when prompted and even then, Gates or his driver were misidentified as possibly "Hispanic" (direct quote).

And yet, somehow, "two black men (were reported)" appeared in the initial police report. This, despite the firm denial by the complainant (Lucia Whalen) that she ever mentioned the race of anyone.

Those are the facts. Furthermore, since when has insulting anyone....in other words, exercising your First Amendment right to be a jerk...been an arrestable offense? Detestable, perhaps. But it is not an arrestable offense for anyone, standing on their own property, to call a cop names.

After all, one would think they've heard a lot worse from traffic violators, yet county and town jails all across this nation are studiously empty of boneheads with quick tempers, mouthing off to the cop who stopped them for a taillight violation.

But wait! There's more from Mr. Franks!

The “elitism” narrative routinely blind-sides them, takes them by surprise again and again. There they are, feeling good about their solidarity with the coffee-growers of Guatemala, and then they find themselves on the receiving end of criticism from, say, the plumbers of Ohio.

Elitism, in this case, meaning a man who teaches at Harvard University is not entitled to the same basic Constitutional protections that, say, a limousine-riding Ph.D. columnist for the Wall Street Journal is. Especially if said teacher is uppity and black. But I digress.

But then again, limousine-riding Ph. D. columnists for the Wall Street Journal would hardly deign to share a beer with anyone, much less the house Negro at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, would they? Or is he just jealous that The Man is keeping a white man down?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

A dying screed

By Creature

I haven't weighed in on the Professor Gates, Officer Crowley, and President Obama story yet. I'm slow to react, I think, because, even after all these years, I'm still amazed by the stupid coming out of our media and the Right Wing noise machine that they feed into.

When Lynn Sweet asked the Gates question Wednesday night, my ears certainly pricked up. I was intrigued to see how the president would respond and I was pleased with his answer (and all his answers since, especially Friday's). I think he was right to delve in, despite it being a local matter, despite the potential distraction to healthcare reform. If he, as the first black president, can't answer a question that has race at its core, then who can? Like the man said, it's part of his portfolio.

Meanwhile, the Right in this country are perfectly content to sweep racism under the rug until it serves their own purpose, until they perceive themselves as the victims of it in some perverse reverse fashion. For them, it's all vapors the moment anyone who's actually experienced racism speaks up. And, with a media ready to provide them an uncritical couch, it's hard to see any end. Thankfully, however, there is an end. Not that racism will ever go away, but those on the Right who feel unduly burdened by it (while refusing to see it in themselves) are a dying breed. Their end is about demographics. It's about math and, thankfully, the math is on the side of diversity and, hopefully, tolerance.

On Gates arrest, Obama says Cambridge police "acted stupidly," conservatives freak out

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Bill "Krazy" Kristol -- as krazy, and as shamelessly partisan and neoconish, at the WaPo as he was at the NYT -- may think, spinning recklessly, that Obama was irresponsibly attacking the police when he asserted in his press conference last night that the Cambridge cops who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own house "acted stupidly," but the truth is that, even in 2009, it takes a black man in the Oval Office to point out the obvious.

Alas, the obvious is no longer obvious when filtered through the ideological prism -- see no evil, hear no evil, at least when it comes to race (unless it's the alleged reverse racism of minorities like Sotomayor, which white men across the land are oh-so-sensitive about, any threat to the privilege of their little establishment) -- of the likes of Bill Kristol.

**********

Obama has since defended his comments, and rightly so, saying that "everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed."

For more, including all the Kristol-like right-wing reaction, see Memeorandum.

**********

Most stupid of all, perhaps, Kristol claims in his post that Gates was likely to blame for the incident. And why? Simply because he's a Harvard professor -- who are all, it seems, stupid and arrogant.

This is why Kristol sides instinctually with the Cambridge cops.

Really? This sort of inane, instinctual commentary is what got Kristol a post at the WaPo after his dismissal from the NYT?

**********

The Boston Herald is reporting that the cop who stupidly arrested Gates tried valiantly to keep Celtics star Reggie Lewis alive.

And the point is what? That a good and noble act excuses all else? Forever?

Please.

**********

The NYT article linked above stupidly claims that "Obama has sought to transcend, if not avoid, the issue of race."

Really? Yes, I would agree that much of his rhetoric has been post-racial, but he has never avoided the issue.

What he has sought to do throughout his political career -- think back to his 2004 DNC keynote address -- is build bridges across America's deepest divides. In his brilliant speech on race during the primary campaign last year, partly a response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright conflagration, he emphasized that America's still-abundant racial divides pose an obstacle to the realization of the more perfect union that the Founders envisioned.

Just because he talks about overcoming these racial divides -- that is, about "transcendence" -- it doesn't mean he is oblivious to the realities of the present, nor that he wants to avoid race altogether.

Apparently, though, talking maturely about race and racism flies over the heads not just of conservatives but of reporters at the NYT.