Photographic proof that Gates is lying

Henry “the Signifying Hustler” Gates, in his interview at The Root, which is analyzed by me here, made this interesting claim:

The police report says I was engaged in loud and tumultuous behavior. That’s a joke. Because I have a severe bronchial infection which I contracted in China and for which I was treated and have a doctor’s report from the Peninsula hotel in Beijing. So I couldn’t have yelled. I can’t yell even today, I’m not fully cured.

I expressed my doubts about this. It seemed too pat, too convenient, that he just happened to have a story to show he couldn’t have been yelling, and that he even had a note from his doctor in China, like a global elite teenager playing hooky, to prove it! Could anything better capture Gates’s adolescent, self-centered, entitlement mentality?

But the simple unlikelihood of Gates’s bronchial infection story is not the strongest reason to doubt it.

Look at the photo of his arrest, which Gintas has lightened to make the details easier to see, particularly the contours of Gates’s open mouth, which are not at all clear in other online versions of this image:

“This is what happens to black men in America!”
Yes, when they break the law, they get arrested.

You can see that his mouth is opened as wide as it is possible for a human mouth to be opened, with the whole tongue showing, and he is evidently highly excited. People don’t have their mouths open that wide, and don’t have such an agitated expression and posture, unless they are yelling at the top of their lungs. And from the extremely alarmed expression on his face, it looks as though Gates is crying out exactly what he said in his interview he felt was happening when the officer came to his front door: “I’M IN DANGER! THEY’RE TAKING ME AWAY! JUST BECAUSE I’M BLACK! ” Now let’s leave aside the fact that a 58 year old supposedly distinguished and renowned Harvard professor is carrying on like a maniac after he’s been arrested, instead of cooperating with the police as a normal citizen—especially an innocent citizen—would. Let’s just focus on the fact that he is yelling as loud as he can, and that in his interview he said that he didn’t yell and that he couldn’t yell even if he wanted to. Since he’s lying about that, it is reasonably likely that every other questionable assertion is his story, every statement that grossly contradicts Officer Crowley’s report, is also a lie.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

To see how much Gintas improved the photograph and brought out information about Gates that most people have not seen in it, here’s an example of how the photo looks elsewhere on the Web.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 23, 2009 12:49 AM | Send