The charge against Crowley becomes ever more refined, finally arriving at his true offense against liberalism

Ok, at first the charge was raw racism, meaning that Officer Crowley gave Henry Gates a tough time—barging into his home, refusing to tell him his name, and finally busting him—just because Gates is a black man in America. Gates even told TV news personality Soledad O’Brien that Crowley was “a rogue cop,” who “couldn’t stand seeing a black man stand up for his rights.” Then the raw racism charge was dropped and replaced by a charge of racial profiling, meaning that the information Crowley had received that two black men had broken into the house blinded him to the possibility that they may have been doing something legitimate, and so he persisted in disbelieving Gates even after Gates told him that he lived in the house. But then Gates and his attorney Charles Ogletree dropped the racial profiling charge, and Gates began saying instead that Crowley’s crime was that he had been impolite to Gates. Then that charge was put aside, and Gates’s supporters, while conceding that Crowley’s report was accurate as to all the facts including Gates’s disgraceful behavior, said that Crowley was still wrong to arrest Gates, because other people arrested for similar behavior have not been convicted.

The contemporary moral equivalent of a lynching in the Jim Crow South has thus evolved into a matter of legalisms.

That’s where the story stood earlier today.

However, the refinement of the case against Crowley is not still not finished. Only now have we finally arrived at his true offense in liberals’ eyes, as explained in a post by Heather Mac Donald today at the Corner:

Don’t You Know Who I Am? [Heather Mac Donald]
Here’s the real problem with police officers: Forget about being racist, they’re just so, well, parochial! The New York Times can barely contain its amazement today over Sergeant James Crowley’s narrow experience: “Even when Professor Gates produced identification in the kitchen of his home that day,” reporters Don Van Natta Jr. and Abby Goodnough write, “Sergeant Crowley had no idea who he was. Days later, the sergeant was surprised when friends explained that he was one of Harvard’s most famous professors.” Imagine that! Not knowing who Henry Louis Gates Jr. was! I’ll bet Crowley doesn’t even know who Maureen Dowd is. What do they teach these guys in the police academy, anyway?

So there you have it. As the facts have come out and the Big Lies have been discredited one by one, Crowley has progressed in the liberal demonology from a malignant thug out of Mississippi Burning, to a guy who doesn’t know that Henry Louis Gates is an eminent black scholar. I guess Crowley had trouble relating to the eminent scholar bit, after Gates had said to him, “You have no idea who you’re messing with,” and “Ya, I’ll speak with yo mama outside.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2009 03:55 PM | Send