I’m irritated by this whole cop and Harvard Law Professor story. And because the President of our country felt that he needed to give an opinion about it without being there or knowing all the facts, then I’m going to do the same thing.
Today, the professor said he’s ready to move on and put the whole thing behind him and figure out a way to make it all a teachable moment and blah blah blah. This is after, mind you, he spent the few days after the incident blathering on and on and demanding apologies and threatening lawsuits and telling everyone he was going to make a documentary about racial profiling and basically throwing a total tantrum over the entire experience. It wasn’t until he got a phone call from his buddy Barack that he decided to sound like a rational adult. Now, after the phone call, he’s all puppies and skittles and rainbows about it – and would be delighted to take part in a beer buddy-fest at the White House with the cop who arrested him and Obama himself.
Say it with me. Awwww.
Anyway, seeing as how I know about as much as the President did when he gave his opinion about it, and perhaps more since the story has gotten so much press, I’m just going to say it. Professor Gates is the ONLY person in this equation who made this a racial issue, by shouting, “Why – because I’m a black man in America” when he was simply asked to SPEAK to the officer for a moment. He proceeded to yell and scream about the policeman being a racist simply for asking him for identification. For coming to his home to PROTECT IT. For doing his freaking JOB. And to put icing on the cake, he even made some remarks about the cop’s “mama.” Nice.
Now – should he have been arrested? Perhaps not. I mean, typically you can’t arrest people for just being total assclowns. But in this case, with someone acting that belligerently and with other cops there to back you up, (a black one even!), I can certainly see why Crowley took him in.
Daisy and I talked about this the other day. How, if it had been one of our homes, and a cop came to make sure our house wasn’t being broken into, we can’t imagine throwing the kind of hissy fit that Gates did. There was just no reason for it, and there was CERTAINLY no reason for it to become a racial issue. And this is what irritates me. Gates flipped the freak out that a white cop would be asking a black man for ID, instead of just taking a cool second to think, “Hey – I can see why it looks like I’m breaking into a house right now” and being grateful a cop cared enough to make sure everything was ok. For Obama to claim that the cop acted stupidly and then go on some huge tangent about racial tensions in the country is just plain WACK to me.
But then again, I wasn’t there. I didn’t see what happened. I guess Obama and I have that in common.
