Mr. President — I campaigned for you. I haven’t been with you 100% since you’ve been inaugurated — warrantless wiretrapping, not killing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’, Issues of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners — I’m a dyed in the wool Eugene McCarthy liberal, you know where I stand.
But yesterday you said something I could really get behind — you said the Cambridge police acted stupidly when they arrested Henry Louis Gates! Now THAT’S my President — not afraid to call cops stupid.
Now today he came close to apologizing. Weak.
Fact is, an able-bodied Cambridge policeman arrested an old crippled man, because the man — Gates — cursed him out. Why is it that cops think they can arrest people just for being lippy? WTF man — a few years back my next door neighbor stood in his front yard yelling at me for 5 solid minutes. Can I put him in cuffs? Is it a crime to be rude to a cop? Apparently so, because many, many people have been arrested or even put in the hospital for talking back to the police.
And as Harry Allen pointed out — this happened to a black man, and no one can come up with a SINGLE case where a white professor was arrested in his own home. To say race doesn’t matter in this issue is bullshit.