…and why it showed up in a press conference about the President’s proposed health care rationing program – OK, I can’t help you there. But you can get the basic details of the Gates arrest here (via John Lott’s Website).
The scene – two black men on the porch of a stately home on a tree-lined Cambridge street in the middle of the day – triggered events that were at turns dramatic and bizarre, a confrontation between one of the nation’s foremost African-American scholars and a police sergeant responding to a call that someone was breaking into the house.
It ended when Gates, 58, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct in allegedly shouting at the officer; he was eventually taken away in handcuffs.
But the encounter is anything but over. Some of Gates’s outraged colleagues said the run-in proves that even in a liberal enclave like Harvard Square, even with someone of Gates’s accomplishments, a black man is a suspect before he is a resident.
Bolding mine, and there to highlight my sardonic observation: what do you mean, “even?” Not to be rude about it, but there ain’t no racist like a Bostonian racist*. Which is not necessarily a knock on the cop; it’s a knock on the neighbor who called the cops on Prof. Gates in the first place.
Moe Lane
*Speaketh the man with numerous – and non-racist – relatives in Massachusetts, most of whom will admit this readily (and ruefully) enough.
Crossposted to RedState.
An event like this should paralyze the “Kremlin on the Charles” for weeks. Expect the town leaders to pass a tax increase while everyone’s distracted.