Bits & Pieces

I  love these guys. Great technique and very funny.

Straightforward analysis. Rich argues that the real dynamic at play is the reaction of a certain group of whites who are having real trouble accommodating to the reality that the US is on a direct path to becoming a minority white country.

Read the whole article.

Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, where Brit Hume last Sunday lamented how insulting it is “to be labeled a racist” in “contemporary” America. “That fact has placed into the hands of certain people a weapon,” he said, as he condemned Gates for hurling that weapon at a police officer. Gates may well have been unjust — we don’t know that Crowley is a racist — but the professor was provoked by being confronted like a suspect in the privacy of his own home.

What about those far more famous leaders in Hume’s own camp who insistently cry “racist” — and in public forums — without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn’t mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother.

What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.

Christopher Hitchens argues persuasively that Gates shouldn’t have formed his defense on racial profiling, but on simple (but powerful) constitutional rights.

Money quote:

I can easily see how a black neighbor could have called the police when seeing professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to push open the front door of his own house. And I can equally easily visualize a thuggish or oversensitive black cop answering the call. And I can also see how long it might take the misunderstanding to dawn on both parties. But Gates has a limp that partly accounts for his childhood nickname and is slight and modest in demeanor. Moreover, whatever he said to the cop was in the privacy of his own home. It is monstrous in the extreme that he should in that home be handcuffed, and then taken downtown, after it had been plainly established that he was indeed the householder. The president should certainly have kept his mouth closed about the whole business—he is a senior law officer with a duty of impartiality, not the micro-manager of our domestic disputes—but once he had said that the police conduct was “stupid,” he ought to have stuck to it, quite regardless of the rainbow of shades that was so pathetically and opportunistically deployed by the Cambridge Police Department. It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right. And such rights cannot be negotiated away over beer.

It looks like the police may have more problems with the Gates arrest. The City of Cambridge released the 911 tape. The caller did not claim that she saw two men breaking into the house.

The caller, Lucia Whalen, told the dispatcher she was calling on behalf of an older woman who lived on the street and had seen the men — who turned out to be Professor Gates and his cabdriver — forcing their way into the home. Police officials have said the older woman had just moved into the neighborhood. Ms. Whalen, 40, works on the block.

“They kind of had to barge in, and they broke the screen door and they finally got in,” Ms. Whalen said on the recording, adding that she had also seen two suitcases on the porch.

She later said, “I don’t know if they live there and just had a hard time with their key.”

The City also released a tape of Sergeant Crowley’s radio communications with the police dispatcher.

After Sergeant Crowley arrived at the home, according to the tape, he radioed that he was with a man who “says he resides here,” but he described him as “uncooperative” and asked for backup, saying, “Keep the cars coming.” He also asked the dispatcher to “send the Harvard University police this way.”

More and more it does look like the police over-reacted.