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The Barack Backlash: How Obama's Presidency Has Gone From Deity To Doubtful MAX HASTINGS 01st August 2009 On Thursday night, the most powerful man on earth spent 55 minutes of his priceless time simply sharing a beer with a police officer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a Harvard professor. This minutely orchestrated media event was designed to rescue Barack Obama from the most idiotic, yet nonetheless damaging, row of his presidency. The American people are convulsed, not with laughter, because the story touches the obsessive issue of racism. It began a fortnight ago, when Professor Louis Gates locked himself out of...

Today, I spoke briefly with a liberal member of California’s education establishment (forgive the obvious tautology), who told me that his Berkeley home had recently been broken into while he was in Washington, D.C. It’s been a wake-up call, he said. We were too lax. We’ll be putting in a security-alarm system. And then came the clincher: “This is a very diverse neighborhood.” Now what would possibly be the relevance of that euphemism to the likelihood of getting burgled, I wonder? Unlike Berkeley intelligentsia, the police actually don’t practice such blatant racial profiling — overwhelmingly, they use observed behavioral and...

Race Relations: Two people acted responsibly in Gatesgate and did what they were supposed to do. Only one of them got invited to the White House to have a beer with the president and the professor.We don't know whether Lucia Whalen is a connoisseur of fine brews. We do know she wasn't invited to have one with President Obama, professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge, Mass., police department. She should have been. The rabid left would say Whalen "acted stupidly" in reporting a possible crime in progress. Some are in fact saying it. The facts...

She saw two guys she didn’t know, one of whom was black, breaking into a house so she decided to err on the side of caution and call the cops. Ergo, racism. As it turns out, she didn’t identify either Gates or his cab driver as black in the actual call to police, a fact the media paid some attention to after the tape was released as possibly exonerating her of any malign intent. But as a lefty friend said to me today, what would it prove if she had ID’d them by race? That’s a standard detail given in...

One of the many tricks the left has developed to make conservatives play Argument Defense is the trick of renaming simple, normal things so that they sound like they’re evil. My personal favorite is “objectifying women.” When a man appreciates a woman’s beauty, or longs for her, or even lusts for her, that’s just nature taking its course. Nothing wrong with it, as long as he behaves himself. But “objectifying women,” or “regarding women as sex objects,” sure sounds bad, doesn’t it? Makes you feel like you have to come up with some way to explain yourself–something, I mean, other...

The final moments of President Obama’s press conference last week have gotten the most attention, and some of the president’s supporters have wondered whether his big-footed interference in the Harvard professor’s melodrama has overshadowed his push for health-care reform. But the president’s response to Gatesgate actually sheds a lot of light on his approach to health care and other issues, for this reason: Obama adopts his positions before knowing what he is talking about. To be fair, Obama admitted as much, at least as far as Gates was concerned. “I don’t know all the facts,” he acknowledged, before launching into...

Many people hoped that the election of a black President of the United States would mark our entering a "post-racial" era, when we could finally put some ugly aspects of our history behind us. That is quite understandable. But it takes two to tango. Those of us who want to see racism on its way out need to realize that others benefit greatly from crying racism. They benefit politically, financially, and socially. Barack Obama has been allied with such people for decades. He found it expedient to appeal to a wider electorate as a post-racial candidate, just as he has...

<p>For some defense lawyers, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was less about racial profiling than about how persons can be arrested simply for speaking angry words to a police officer.</p> <p>The laws against "disorderly conduct" give police wide power to arrest people who are said to be disturbing the peace or disrupting the neighborhood.</p>

The networks might just as well have hung out a sign this morning: non-African-American experts on policing and racial profiling need not apply. Good Morning America, the Early Show and Today had a total of six guests on the subject . . . and every one was African-American. Among the highlights: a writer from Tina Brown's Daily Beast suggested that given our incarceration rate, the USA meets the definition of a "police state." View video here.

Wednesday night of this week, during U.S. President Barack Obama’s press conference, Lynn Sweet, a reporter (and Washington Bureau Chief) for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked the president a question about the July 16th arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by officers of the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department for disorderly conduct. By now, just about everybody in America is aware of the arrest of the prominent Harvard scholar (and a professed friend of Barack Obama) and of President Obama’s declaration that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” this though he also admitted not knowing anything about the facts surrounding the...

JULY 23--Here are the police reports detailing the confrontation last week between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge cops, who were condemned last night by President Barack Obama for acting "stupidly" in arresting the African-American scholar. Cops responded to Gates's house after neighbor Lucia Whalen reported spotting "two black males with backpacks" trying to gain entry to the home (Gates, returning home from a trip overseas, and his driver were contending with a stuck front door). The Cambridge Police Department reports, authored by Sergeant James Crowley and Officer James Figueroa, quote an incensed Gates yelling, "This is what...

Henry Louis Gates Jr. just got the subject for his next PBS series, and it’s not going to be a history of the woeful consequences of yelling at cops. The Harvard scholar was arrested for disorderly conduct at his Cambridge, Mass., home in an incident that has earned the Cambridge police a rebuke from the president of the United States. In a press conference otherwise devoted to trying to save his sinking health-care plan, Barack Obama said the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates, although Obama stipulated twice that he didn’t know all the facts. Obama’s ignorance didn’t keep...

A Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer said Thursday he will "never apologize" about how he handled the arrest of prominent black Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Sgt. Jim Crowley said he has nothing to apologize for in regards to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. "That apology will never come from me as Jim Crowley, it won't come from me as sergeant in the Cambridge Police Department," Sgt. James Crowley told Boston radio station WEEI. "Whatever anybody else chooses to do in the name of the city of Cambridge or the Cambridge Police Department which are beyond my...

Let’s devote careful study to the recent unfortunate incident involving noted African American scholar Henry Louis Gates. And let’s begin by acknowledging that in our country’s past and present, there have been cases which can be labeled “racial profiling.” In the case of Henry Louis Gates vs. the Cambridge Police, however, the sorry affair reads more like a contrived event orchestrated by the arrested party. According to the police report, Gates got home, only to find his front door jammed. A female neighbor saw Gates and a cab driver wrestling to open the front door. Since Gates is relatively new...

I am not Al Sharpton. In fact, I never could be and I don't want to try. I am also not Henry Louis Gates, a man with an undeniable contribution to the legacy of Black Scholarship in America. I am simply Boyce Watkins, the son of a 17-year-old mother and a father who happened to be a high-ranking police official for the past 28 years. I've argued with my father for decades, as his Bill Cosby-like views of the world have often made my face twist with confusion. But I listen to my father, because there is value in seeing...

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, retained a lawyer. Why? He claims cops in Cambridge, Mass., racially profiled him. Here's what happened. Gates, "one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars," writes The Boston Globe, was arrested about 1 p.m. at his home near Harvard Square by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. "The incident," says the Globe, "raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling." "Friends of Gates," writes the Globe, "said he was already in his home when police arrived. He...

Political correctness has always been a malignancy to the body of truth - whatever that truth may be. The willingness of some law enforcement agencies - particularly those directly involved in the security of this country - to shun the practice of "racial profiling" in the name of fairness and objectivity, i.e. political correctness, is not only antithetical to common sense but a genuine threat to security.In that spirit of inanity, here is a two-minute audio spot - a parody - that helps to demonstrate the absurdity of it all.It's an audio-only "commercial" that runs a little over two-minutes long.-

Too many people on the liberal side of the fence argue that illegal immigration is a racial issue. They believe that those of us who want to protect the US boarders are inspired by racism, trying to keep out Hispanics. Recent cases such as the Hezbollah Mole in the CIA case (Nada Nadim Prouty) and the terrorists targeting Army base after sneaking over the borders, highlight the reasons the United States true immigration reform without amnesty. How many others are out there-not to gather information but to launch terror attacks when the time is right. It is more difficult to...

Palo Alto Police Chief Lynne Johnson has again defended her department against charges of racial profiling, saying there's no conclusive evidence of it in the demographic data it collects about traffic stops.

The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen...senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the Herald, under the title "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds...