I wasn't going to weigh in on this idiocy because I expected it would fly South as soon as something more interesting came along, like Sarah's new shotgun. But then it turned ugly. Obama felt it necessary to apologize after Sgt Crowley did some standard cop-whining about how he just didn't understand what Mr Gates got all excited about or why he had to take that kind of...abuse.
“I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” the president said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. “I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently.”
Maybe it is kind of a weenie-ass, Clinton-esque apology with lots of slick, sliding-around, maybe-I-mean-one-thing-maybe-I-mean-something-else language but even that kind of apology was entirely unnecessary.
Cambridge cops are polite enough but it's a politeness that's skin deep. Beneath a veneer of civility is a sense of entitlement as big as Jack Welch's lay-off list. Mark Gisleson has apparently never been in Cambridge because this sort of behavior seems to surprise him.
“From the time he opened the door it seemed that he was very upset, very put off that I was there in the first place,” Crowley told the station. “Not just what he said, but the tone in which he said it, just seemed very peculiar — even more so now that I know how educated he is.”
“I’m still just amazed that somebody of his level of intelligence could stoop to such a level, and berate me, accuse me of being a racist or racial profiling,” Crowley said. “And then speaking about my mother, it’s just — it’s beyond words.”
Beyond words? For a cop to be called a son of a bitch? Taking offense at SOB is a bully’s trick. Those words are used casually but occasionally you run into the chip on his shoulder kind of guy/officer who takes them literally as an excuse to punch your lights out.
In Cambridge, trust me, it's more than "occasionally". Most of the force seems to be infected with rich man's arrogance and insider elitism. They may be servants, bigawd, but they're not your servants, not unless you're white and can buy thousand dollar tickets to the Policemen's Ball by the gross. Tug your forelock and bend your knee when they condescend to address you and they'll be polite and gracious enough not to throw you in the slam for dropping that nasty gum wrapper on their nice clean sidewalk. No forelock-tugging or knee-bending? Then you're not showing them the proper "respect" and out comes the ticket pad or the plastic cuffs.
The Cambridge cops have been bullies for 4 decades that I know of. Sensitivity training? It's off their backs like oil off a dipstick. Might as well talk to that fire hydrant over there. If you are not white and/or not driving a no more than 2yr-old Benz while wearing an Armani (or at least a Brooks Bros) suit, you are, as far as they've always been concerned, hoi-polloi they can (and do) look down their blue noses at and rough up if you aren't what they consider to be sufficiently submissive.
I don't know but I suspect it's the $$$. They're so used to kissing rich white ass that they're not so much police as security guards for an uppity, mock-aristocratic corporate-executive town. I mean, Cambridge is major league up-scale, you dig? Harvard, MIT, and lots of $million$ homes tucked away cheek-by-jowl on every street. When the students are loaded, everybody is loaded. Crowley's misplaced sense of injury should have been cut off at the pass. He isn't fooling field any.
It must be nice; put the uppity Nigger in check, and get a call from the President. The book deal and FOX News gig can't be far behind.'"I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically,'.... 'I could have calibrated those words differently, and I told this to Sgt. Crowley.' Watch Obama describe talk »
He reiterated his assertion that he believes police overreacted, but said Gates 'probably overreacted as well.
'"My sense is you have got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved,' he said.""TWO good people"? Really? "Gates probably overreacted as well"? Really? Is that what happens when you are dragged off of your own porch in handcuffs (after a trip half way around the world) for demanding to know what police officers are doing in your house and having an attitude about it? Wow! O man, please tell me you are not throwing another one of your friends under the bus.
“He was right on point,” said Ronald Hampton, executive director of the 15,000-member National Black Police Association. “A post-racial society doesn’t exist. We’re still in a civil rights era. What happened to Gates happens to poor black and brown people every day.”
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Obama was “right on target.”
“We all know, we come from communities where some of us actually understand, and know, and have been racially profiled,” said Lee, surrounded by fellow Black Caucus members. “It’s an example of the unfinished business of America that inequalities and racism continues to exist.”
Yes it does, and Obama needn't have felt sqeamish about saying so to a cop burdened with an over-ripe sense of his own importance.
While I wouldn't say I've lived the thug life, I've certainly lived in a state of near constant lawbreaking most of my adult life. I even look the part with facial hair and a ponytail.
I've never had a cop give me shit. Even when I've been arrested, even on the one occasion when I got rousted.
White means you're OK, and that's the way it's been all my life.
Posted by: Mark Gisleson | July 26, 2009 at 07:37 PM