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We have a large section devoted to the “post racial” president’s knee jerk, race-baiting reaction to the arrest of a college prof who mouthed off to police in Cambridge, MA. First of all, it is obvious the question from Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times was a sweetheart deal of a planted inquiry the kid president was saving for the end of the presser. Our second item from Andy McCarthy points that out. If you don’t believe him, watch it here on You Tube. The question is 51 minutes in and the answer takes three and a half minutes. This part ends with Mark Steyn’s weekly from the OC Register.
Yuval Levin comments first on the unpresidential response.
… It’s the kind of question to which a president would normally reply with something like: “That’s a local police matter, I don’t know the details and I know it will be worked out responsibly,” and move along. (Instead) Obama gave a lengthy review of the facts, called the police officers involved stupid, and implied they are also liars. Very odd behavior for a president.
Andy McCarthy posts on the Q&A setup and the lack of judgment involved.
To Yuval’s insightful observations, I’d add that the Gates question smelled like a set-up to me. Obama went out of his way to call on that reporter as the last questioner of the night — even when some confusion about whether he’d called on someone else resulted in his having to go back to her after taking another question.
For a wartime president managing a slew of manufactured “crises” in a reeling economy, he was sure armed with an astonishing level of detail about the arrestee’s side of the story …
Jay Nordlinger suggests that the president needs to apologize.
Obviously, I am not a fan of President Obama and his policies. (“Obviously,” because I am a National Review person.) But never before, until his comments on the Cambridge, Mass., cops, have I had the following thought: What a jerk. …
Rich Lowry has a photo of the arrest and points out that one of the police officers is black.
And Kathryn Jean Lopez posts that the arresting officer teaches a class about racial profiling.
…Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class on racial profiling for five years at the Lowell Police Academy after being hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black, said Academy Director Thomas Fleming.
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“I have nothing but the highest respect for him as a police officer. He is very professional and he is a good role model for the young recruits in the police academy,” Fleming told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The course, called “Racial Profiling,” teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community “and how you don’t want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from,” Fleming said.
Rich Lowry’s article at NRO gave Gates’ response after the arrest.
Recouping in Martha’s Vineyard, Gates is considering devoting his next documentary to racial profiling. He says if Officer Crowley apologizes, he will do him the favor both of accepting it and educating “him about the history of racism in America.” Since Harvard students pay $33,000 a year for the privilege of getting lectured by Henry Louis Gates, perhaps he sees this as a generous offer rather than another stupendously arrogant gesture.
The Corner posted Charles Krauthammer’s take.
Peter Wehner’s commentary includes a brief description of the arrest.
…Here are the facts as we know them. Sgt. Crowley — who according to reports is an outstanding officer, something of a role model, and a police-academy expert on racial profiling — responded to Gates’s home near Harvard University last week to investigate a report of a burglary and demanded Gates show him identification. (According to media reports, the incident began when a woman caller reported that a man was trying to force his way into a home. Gates said he was unable to enter his damaged front door after returning from a week in China. Crowley arrived on the scene to investigate.) Police say Gates at first refused and then accused the officer of racism.
Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, with police accusing him of being uncooperative, refusing to initially provide identification, and “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior” by repeatedly shouting at a policeman in front of people gathered on the street in front of his house. (The charges were later dropped.)
“I acted appropriately,” Crowley told WBZ Radio Thursday. “Mr. Gates was given plenty of opportunities to stop what he was doing. He didn’t. He acted very irrational; he controlled the outcome of that event. There was a lot of yelling, there was references to my mother, something you wouldn’t expect from anybody that should be grateful that you were there investigating a report of a crime in progress, let alone a Harvard University professor.” …
Mark Steyn adds his witty commentary.
..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. … 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. …
John Fund discusses the hidden victims and the hidden political pressure behind ObamaCare.
President Barack Obama’s health-care sales pitch depends on his ability to obfuscate who is likely to get hurt by reform. At Wednesday’s news conference, for example, he was asked “specifically what kind of pain and sacrifice” he would ask of patients in order to achieve the cost savings he promises.
He insisted he “won’t reduce Medicare benefits” but instead would “make delivery more efficient.” The most Mr. Obama would concede is that some people will have to “give up paying for things that don’t make you healthier.” That is simply not credible.
While Democrats on Capitol Hill dispute claims that individuals will lose their existing coverage under their reform plans, on other issues many Democrats privately acknowledge some people will indeed get whacked to pay for the new world of government-dominated health care.
Democrats have been brilliant in keeping knowledge about the pain and sacrifice of health reform from the very people who would bear the brunt of them. They’ve done so by convincing health-care industry groups not to run the kind of “Harry and Louise”-style ads that helped sink HillaryCare in 1993.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) says the pressure not to run ads has been “intense, bordering on extortion.” …
John Stossel calls on Fredrich Hayek and Adam Smith for insight in the health care debate.
It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It’s even crazier to do it by August.
Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, “to reinvent the nation’s health care system”.
Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system. …
Charles Krauthammer writes about the trouble with Obamacare.
What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health-care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.
But you can’t fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats’ health-care plans, says the CBO, increase costs on the order of $1 trillion plus. …
Karl Rove comments on Obamacare and the dwindling poll numbers.
On Monday, the Washington Post/ABC poll reported that 49% of Americans approve of his handling of health care while 44% disapprove. What many people missed is that those who strongly disapprove of the president’s approach on health care now outnumber those who strongly approve by 33% to 25%. That presages further decline. Already, 49% of independents disapprove of the president’s approach, up from 30% in April, a staggering shift in 11 weeks.
Mr. Obama is also slipping on the economy. Those who strongly disapprove now outnumber those who strongly approve of his handling of the economy (35% to 29%), of deficits (38% to 19%), and of unemployment (31% to 26%). On Tuesday, Gallup showed Mr. Obama’s personal approval was 55%, down from more than 60% a few weeks ago and lower than the 56% George W. Bush had at this point in his first term. …
The Economist reviews a new clear-eyed history of WW II.
… Mr Roberts hops nimbly between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though Asian readers may feel a bit shortchanged: the fighting in China gets particularly short shrift. Again and again he chides his readers for overestimating the importance of famous British and American battles in the West and overlooking much larger ones on the eastern front: more than 2m Germans were killed in the east, over ten times the number who died fighting in the west. “Britain provided the time, Russia the blood, America the money and the weapons,” he concludes.
He presents stylish penmanship, gritty research and lucid reasoning, coupled with poignant and haunting detours into private lives ruined and shortened. Mr Roberts shows boyish pleasure and admiration at the great feats of arms he describes. But the underlying tones of this magnificent book are in a minor key: furious sorrow at the waste of it all.