Despite the choreography, the White House says there are no ‘pre-cooked’ apologies on tap (pun intended). This is, we are told, just three guys getting to know each other over beers. Totally low-key.
Altogether, this might be a masterstroke of damage-control genius by the Obama White House. Instead of allowing the controversy to suck all the oxygen out of August, Obama can extinguish the flames and spend the month on, you know, health care reform.
But what will they talk about? Instead of risking inflamed passions, maybe they could discuss the news of the day:
A lawyer who moments earlier had been complaining to friends about police overreaction in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., got a taste of the Gates treatment himself after loudly chanting “I hate the police” near a traffic stop in Northwest Washington, D.C.[...]Then the group noticed five or six police cruisers surrounding two cars in an apparent traffic stop on the other side of the street. It seemed to Tuma that was more cops than necessary.
Tuma began chanting “I hate the police” and was arrested on the catch-all charge of “disturbing the peace:”
“Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?” the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma’s companions.
Now, let’s be fair: there’s a damn good reason why police gang up on traffic stops.
Yes, you can argue all day about the uniform deserving respect. Yet the uniform does not confer special legal protections against the Constitution; and in too many communities, the police enforce respect instead of earning it. That is exactly what happened to Gates, and there needs to be more discussion about it.
Worse, in too many cases there is no reciprocal respect. Which brings me to another news item the beer-sipping trio could discuss tonight. Via Daily Banter:
A Boston police officer has been suspended for using a racial slur to describe black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.Commissioner Edward Davis put 36-year-old Justin Barrett on administrative leave pending a termination hearing after learning of the slur.
Barrett sent his revolting correspondence to a reporter at The Boston Globe as well as fellow members of the National Guard; as a result, he may very well lose both his day AND weekend jobs over these disturbing passages:
Your defense of Gates while he is on the phone while being confronted (INDEED) with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and will always be a suspect. His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance. (Emphasis mine)
“Belligerent non-compliance” sounds very much like people crossing a bridge in Selma. I’m not sure how Barrett came to think of suspects as having no rights, or that Gates is eternally suspect and therefore without rights. But it is actually the later paragraphs I find most disturbing, since Barrett claims to be a former English teacher:
(Y)ou state Gates is “this immensely famous expert on race” — you really have to be kidding me? (sic) Famous for what? Expert why and says who? (sic) What has he done for me and my family? What has he done for the law enforcement community or military veterans or to secure freedoms and our borders in this country? What has he done to help limit and reduce my income tax?
That insane compaction of separate issues into one consuming hatred is a hallmark of wingnuttery. It also happens to be a sign of paranoid delusion and borderline personality. The email includes further evidence of self-delusive tendencies: despite using the phrase “banana-eating jungle-monkey” in reference to Gates no less than four times, Barret says:
I am not a racist, but I am prejudice (sic) towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they claim is freedom when in is merely attention because you do not receive enough of it in your little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers.
Perhaps Officer Crowley can explain his fellow Boston PD officer. Perhaps he can listen to Gates explain that, all too often, police officers become cartoons of their profession.
