PrintJuly 23, 2009
The President and the professor
So much for selling ObamaCare. The only real news coming out of the President's news conference last night was his outrageous slander of Cambridge, MA cops as "stupid". The cops' "stupidity" consisted of arresting his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates for disorderly conduct.
Speaking of "stupid", how about a supposed expert on constitutional law jumping to a conclusion after admitting he didn't know the details of the case? Or for that matter, how about reassuring the American people about their ability to keep their existing health insurance after admitting to a blogger that he was "unfamiliar" with the actual relevant sections of the House bill he is touting?
The police report on Gates' arrest is quite clear, and damning to Gates. So embarrassing, in fact, that the Boston Globe, which originally published it on its website, scrubbed it, lest its liberal readers know too much. No such inhibitions affected the rival Boston Herald, though,
which published a picture taken by a neighbor of Gates with his mouth wide open, obviously yelling -- which, in the circumstances of an arrest, looks a lot like disorderly conduct.
which published a picture taken by a neighbor of Gates with his mouth wide open, obviously yelling -- which, in the circumstances of an arrest, looks a lot like disorderly conduct.The astute Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald publishes some highly relevant information for the cop who arrested Gates, who has been damned by Gates as racist
The Boston Herald, in an extensive search of the man's background, discovered that a cop of the same name had performed intensive and intimate lifesaving techniques on another prominent black man, Celtics star Reggie Lewis, 16 years ago. Turns out it was the same James Crowley. On that occasion, he also had to fend off accusation of racism. He agreed to speak about it when approached Boston Herald:The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics superstar's life 16 years ago Monday.
"I wasn't working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn't working on a black man. I was working on another human being," Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward's fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.
It's a date Crowley still can recite by rote - and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete.
"Some people were saying ‘There's the guy who killed Reggie Lewis' afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights," he said.
Crowley, 42, said he's not a racist, despite how some have cast his actions in the Gates case. "Those who know me know I'm not," he said.
I don't think the President did himself any good last night. He not only failed in his mission to sell ObamaCare, he opened a can of worms by flaunting his willingness to judge without knowing the facts, and condemn a brave police officer. He owes Officer Crowley an apology.
Somehow the words of Forest Gump spring to mind: "Stupid is as stupid does."
