Why did I vote for Obama? Two reasons: (1) he was better than the alternatives (not enough room here to elaborate properly), and (2) his election would represent an historical moment of some import.

How did I view Jeremiah Wright? A bit wacko but generally taken out of context in most of the sound bytes I heard. Representative of his generation but not the hate-monger the sound-bytes suggested.

Why did you I believe the many, many people who said that what little we knew of Obama was not good? See part (1) of my earlier reply concerning why I voted for him. Also, as evidenced by the election, many, many more people thought he was good enough to be elected.

But all the above notwithstanding, I believe in lifelong learning.

How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation’s “Leading Black Intellectual”
Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

By ISHMAEL REED

Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”–the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

After this experience, will Gates stop attributing the problems of those inner city dwellers to the behavior of “thirty five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects?” (Gates says that when he became a tough lover he was following the example of his mentor Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka as though his and Soyinka’s situations were the same. As a result of Soyinka’s criticisms of a Nigerian dictator, he was jailed and his life constantly threatened.)

(snip)

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. has never been shy about speaking up for affirmative action. Indeed, the prominent Harvard professor insists that he wouldn’t be where he is today without it. Odd, then, that when it came to assembling a staff to compile an encyclopedia of black history, Gates hired a group that was almost exclusively white. Of the up to 40 full-time writers and editors who worked to produce Encarta Africana only three were black. What’s more, Gates and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah rejected several requests from white staffers to hire more black writers. Mother Jones turned to Gates for an explanation of this apparent inconsistency.

“Did the staff members who expressed concern that the Africana team was too white have a point?”

Gates responded:

“It’s a disgusting notion that white people can’t write on black history–some of the best scholars of Africa are white. People should feel free to criticize the quality of the encyclopedia, but I will not yield one millimeter[to people who criticize the makeup of the staff]. It’s wrongheaded. Would I have liked there to be more African Americans in the pool? Sure. But we did the best we could given the time limits and budget.”

Who could blame you? I remember Bush’s first 8 months in office, when he made anti-terrorism his No. 1 priority … or was that tax cuts? I can’t quite remember….

The fact is that Bush put off meeting with security people about the al qaeda threat until August, despite repeated entreaties by those security people to do so (not to mention the memo delivered to his Texas ranch, the title of which he tried to have classified as secret — alas, to no avail).

Nice try, Roger. As if any police officer “decides” whether or not to investigate a report of a break-in in progress.

“But the event that will forever spoil the Obama-Gates effort to co-opt the moral high ground in this controversy was policewoman Kelly King’s testimony on behalf of her colleague Sgt. Crowley….”

One cop supporting another’s testimony — unheard of! I guess even race doesn’t trump what Michael Connelly (a wonderful novelist, btw) calls the “Blue Religion.”

Correct, and people like the blogger shouldn’t spin the fact that Whalen never mentioned “two black men with backpacks”-as Crowley did in his police report-to keep saying the Sgt. was in the right. Until the gap between what the witness didn’t say and what the officer wrote is addressed, I’d say there is a problem for Crowley.

Yes, she stood up for what she believes. At a time when the protocol made it impossible for her white colleague to speak up, she stepped up to the mike, so to speak. Her disappointment with the president was also very illuminating.