Crowley
Kevin V. writes:
Isn’t it amazing that one single cop with balls has inflicted more damage on the President of the United States than the entire Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, and the “conservative” movement combined?
LA replies:
I was about to say that Officer Crowley didn’t show any particular intestinal fortitude, he was just doing his job, and that the damage to Obama was wrought by Obama himself.
But then I recalled this: by the time Crowley put the cuffs on Gates, he knew that Gates was a Harvard big shot, he knew that Gates had promised retribution against him, and he knew that Gates would be charging him with racism. He knew that arresting Gates would cause him, Crowley, a lot of trouble. But he did his job and arrested him just the same. He did the right thing, which the lily-livered “conservatives” at National Review said afterward he should not have done. His correct action triggered Gates’s and then Obama’s self-discrediting idiocy.
So I change what I was about to say, and I agree with you. One (Democratic-voting) cop with balls damaged Obama more than the entire Republican Party and conservative movement combined.
- end of initial entry -
Paul K. writes:
You refer to Crowley as “One (Democratic-voting) cop.”
Has Crowley said he’s an Obama supporter? The published transcription of his radio interview incorrectly had him saying, “I support the president, one hundred and ten percent.” When you listen to the interview, what Crowley says is “I support the president—to an extent.”
Has he said elsewhere that he supports Obama?
LA replies:
I thought he had said that.
David B. writes:
It just struck me that Gates WANTED to be arrested from the start. He was going to keep pushing Crowley until it happened. Gates envisioned himself as a hero fighting the “racist police.” He also expected a groveling apology. It didn’t turn out as Gates wanted.
A personal experience if I may. Some years ago, I made a turn onto a busy street. A black police officer stopped me and said I had made a dangerous turn, which I didn’t think I had. The cop had me get out of the car, and, while we were standing in full view of dozens of cars passing in both directions, he lectured me on auto safety. The cop said that he had pulled a lot of dead people out of wrecked cars in his time and didn’t want to see it happen to me. I believe he meant well.
I stood there and accepted what he told me and promised not to do it again. The cop let me go without writing me a ticket and I went on my way. I was more careful after that, so maybe he did me some good.
Suppose I had started yelling and cursing at the cop? My point is that in a similar situation, Henry Gates deliberately created an incident which I am sure he wanted to be a national news story.
Mark A. writes:
“Conservative” movement is right. It is time we stopped referring to liberal evangelical Christians as conservatives.
Glynn Custred writes:
Crowley showed courage given the fact that he was up aganst the Harvard elite and the Cambridge mind-set. I am an academic and am in Berkeley all the time, so I know what kind of environment he lives in. I am also on the board of directors of Friends of the Border Patrol (the chairman of the legal defense fund of the Ramos/Campeon case) and on the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Officers Action Committtee. I therefore understand the plight of law enforcement. I think Crowley handled the situation pretty well.
Jim B. writes:
Officer Crowley distinctly said in a videotaped interview that “I didn’t vote for him,” meaning Obama. It occurs at 2:00 minutes into the following video interview.
I’ve watched pretty much all the videos and read everything I could about CrowleyGate and I’ve come away with great admiration and respect for the way Sergeant Crowley stood up for his actions. Not many people could have handled those initial days as well as he did.
Crowley is a good soldier, a man who loves his country and by extension greatly respects its institutions, including the Presidency. There was no way Crowley could have refused Obama’s invitation to the White House. If he did try to hold out for an apology before going, he position would have been excoriated by the liberal media as evidence of Crowley’s racial animus.
I will say I think Crowley is in awe of the status of a Harvard professor and the education necessary to attain that feat, however undeserved it might be in Gates’s case. In the photo of Crowley helping Gates down the steps at the White House I saw a number of things. One in particular is that Crowley is amidst his enemies and unaware of it. Here are two wildly successful race hucksters, both of them lacking in character, both of them artfully deceitful and both of them exploiting a fine and decent white citizen for their own ends. Sad really. Just days earlier, Gates was publicly trying to destroy the officer. Crowley is unaware of their real ambitions because he does not think like them or know what they want. It is why the West is in decline. They have found our Achilles heel.
My worry is that over time, by friendship and academic lecture, Gates will get Crowley to admit he may have he erred in arresting him. That will be Gates’s end game, and, if achieved, he will waste no time going public with it.
LA replies:
This is an excellent, balanced summing up of the different aspects of the situation. I admire this comment. I’m posting it in the current entry and also in the “Obamus Maximus” entry.
I have to add that just a few minutes ago as I was walking to buy a soda in my neighborhood I had a fantasy/daydream that was the opposite of yours. I imagined that after a couple of social get-togethers with Crowley, Gates came out and said, “I want to say to the world, Officer Crowley did nothing wrong that day. He was properly doing his job. The person who showed racial bigotry was not Crowley but myself. I projected my negative feelings about white police in general onto this good man who was just doing his job of protecting the public and enforcing the law.”
And then I thought, if Crowley managed to lead Gates in this direction, his decision to accept Obama’s invitation and even meet again with Gates afterward would have been shown as right, and my criticisms of him for accepting the invitation would be shown as wrong.
I’m not saying that I think this is going to happen. I’m simply reporting this fantasy that came to me as I was walking along.
Of course, it has been argued (not by me, but I see the reason in it) that Crowley had to accept the invitation or be seen as a boor. By going to the White House, being sociable, yet holding his ground, he further established his own maturity in relation to his unworthy interlocutors. So I don’t deny that there were good reasons for him to go. Still, my feeling is that it would have been better if he hadn’t gone.
E. writes:
Good stuff Larry keep kicking then in the _ _ _ _ _
LA writes:
On the question of what Crowley has accomplished here, Steve Sailer on July 24—almost a week before the beer summit—quoted Obama’s non-apology apology and then continued with several good points:
Obviously, this isn’t much of a real apology [LA comments: it’s not an apology at all], but the basic fact remains that the President’s racial prejudices just got stared down by the Policeman who had the facts on his side….
Teachable moments? The first is that Obama’s comments at his news conference on the “stupidity” of the Cambridge Police Department were, despite all his lawyerly stipulations, a textbook example of racial prejudice in action. He had prejudged these specific events based on his deeply held views on the general racial situation in America.
As in Ricci, we see the value of civil servant unions in standing up to racialized politicians. Crowley’s cop union stood shoulder to shoulder with him and helped him face down the Governor and the President. Government employee unions are expensive, but they do have an interest in standing up for civil service rules in fighting the new racial spoils system perpetrated under the guise of “civil rights.”
Another lesson is that as the Establishment has ratcheted up Racism into the worst sin imaginable in the history of the world, it has not correspondingly ratcheted up the seriousness of the consequences of falsely accusing somebody of “racism.” … Crowley refused to buckle under to extraordinary pressure, going all the way up to the President, thus setting a new standard for how to respond to false charges.
It’s time to pressure Obama to publicly call on his friend Skip Gates to withdraw his charges of racism against Officer Crowley on the grounds that the epidemic of false charges of racism must be halted.
Now, that would be a Teachable Moment!…
An interesting psychological point is that the same stubborn professionalism that helped make Officer Crowley a hard-ass toward Professor Gates has made him a heroic public citizen in his refusal to be browbeat by President Obama. He’s shown more spine than James Watson or Larry Summers.
[end of Sailer excerpt]
These are good points. Crowley acted properly, he spoke honestly, and he calmly stood his ground when subjected to a nationwide attempt to cast him as a racist, and even the weak reeds at National Review were second guessing his decision to arrest Gates. As a result he helped create a uniquely clarifying moment in modern American history, in which the anti-white white-racism-baiters were, for once, exposed for what they are. The steady, principled, and correct conduct exhibited by this ordinary police officer was the very opposite of the behavior shown by men vastly higher than him in the social hierarchy, by Larry Summers, by Pope Benedict, and by James Watson, at the time of their respective Golgothas. Public virtue is always to be commended, but it is so rare in liberal society, which systematically militates against it, that we should particularly honor it when we see it.
August 4
Kevin V. writes:
On Crowley, I didn’t really follow the story too closely because, after seven years in Berkeley and watching the Berkeley PD close up, I knew how the script was going to go. I actually laughed when I clicked the link to boston.com only to find the police report gone as I had said to myself when reading your initial post, “Well, that police report won’t be there for long!”
The key event that broke the script and took the story in the direction it ended up taking was the remarkable cross-racial solidarity displayed by Crowley’s colleagues, which I found enormously moving and a hopeful moment. But for that, they would have hung Crowley.
Frankly, I’m amazed that in this day and age that there are still white men willing to do what’s right while policing black communities, when they know (and they do know) that they will be dumped on by their superiors if and when it is politically expedient to do so.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2009 08:58 PM | Send