Mere weeks after telling the NAACP that blacks need to stop blaming racism for inattentive and absent fathers, disintegrating families and kids that can’t compete with Asians, Obama undermined it all. He looked backward when he had the chance to “re-set” the issue.
Gates reacted from his past. His saw not an honest cop sent to help but an “uppity” cop who got the “do you know who I am?” treatment.
The cop saw it in real time: neighbors had called a forced entry; Gates was there; identification was not a reason to immediately clear someone in a forced entry. Gates might have been held hostage inside so the cop asked him to come out on the porch where he could talk, free of any threats inside.
So Gates, who saw it wrong and acted like a complete jerk to someone sent to help, insists that he was free to berate and insult the cop. Having provoked the cop to no end, now its somehow the cop’s fault for arresting him.
Cops can be jerks. But here, Gates was 100% wrong. Obama should have made this his own “Sister Souljah” moment and shamed Gates. Instead, he blamed the cops, increased the tension between blacks and cops and reopened an old wound.
Really sad.
