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A disgusting moment
I feel sick (but I’ll get over it).
John B., who sent the photo, wrote:
Well—it’s a teachable moment, all right:
LA replies:
I feel sick.
John B. replies:
I hear ya.
John B. continues:
Now, that I look at it more closely—do you think there’s a possibility Sgt. Crowley, too, is clinking his glass, which is simply obscured by the camera angle? In other words—do you think the photo does not quite appear to be what you and I first took it to be?
LA replies:
Can’t tell. Whether he’s clinking or not, I feel sick!
John B. writes:
In fairness:
LA replies:
Oh, great, so Joe is at the table too. Three on one. Where is Crowley’s backup? At another table? In a waiting room?
John B. replies
I thought I’d never type this, but: lol
Seriously: There have been (too many) times when I’ve felt I’ve really stung someone—I mean unfairly. Trying to make up for that is really hard; and oddly enough, as I look at that picture, I can’t help thinking that maybe all three of those men had concluded Sgt. Crowley got a raw deal—and deserved some deference in compensation.
… Huh? What am I thinking? Obama and Gates are saying to themselves, “That’s right—just throw this sop to the white masses, keep them tranquil until we have have our way with them.” Biden doesn’t know what he’s doing.
LA writes:
Here is an ABC News story on it. It’s not worth reproducing.
At the same time, though I strongly feel that Crowley made a big mistake in suggesting this meeting and going to it, because it seems to legitimize Gates’s and Obama’s behavior toward him, it doesn’t change anything that’s happened and what the country has seen.
LA writes:
By the way, the sight of enemies having friendly conversation at an outdoor table at the White House on a summer evening reminds me of an edifying story (most unlike this current distasteful event) that is told in Edmund Morris’s book on Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Around 1907, President Roosevelt had an outdoor party on the White House lawn and William Jennings Bryan, the leading Democrat, who had been defeated for the presidency by the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket in 1900 and would be the opponent of Roosevelt’s chosen successor William Howard Taft the next year, was among the guests. At one point in the evening, Roosevelt and Bryan sat alone at a table talking privately for 45 minutes. Afterward Roosevelt told a friend that Bryan was a “wonderful” man.
Ken Hechtman writes:
This just in—video of the Gates-Crowley interaction.
Kilroy M. writes from Australia:
LA wrote: “…the sight of enemies having friendly conversation…”
They’re not “enemies.” There is One Side, and its colluding, emasculated, dhimmi victim. These people are not in opposition to be considered foes of each other. I see little or no difference between the role played by Biden and the vilified cop in this whole affair.
By the way, the initial photo that was published on this page seems so synthetic. The “professor” strains to participate in the toast, the “president” looks so out of place it is almost comical, and the “law enforcement officer” looks like he’s been sold a s__t sandwich, which he willingly ordered and is too polite to return.
Sympathy factor: Zero.
LA replies:
Kilroy has expressed the most critical possible view of Crowley’s going to this meeting, and it’s hard to say that it’s without justification. Some people might say in defense of Crowley that he’s just a cop, he’s not aware of the political and racial implications of what he’s doing. But even if that were true, he didn’t have to be a political sophisticate or a racial thinker to see the total unacceptability of the meeting; he just had to have some normal pride.
Consider: in addition to Gates’s atrocious ravings at Crowley during the incident, Gates spent several days portraying Crowley in the coarsest terms as a rogue cop, a malignant white racist who goes around looking for blacks to mistreat. It may have been the purest sustained expression of anti-white bigotry ever to take place on the national stage in this country. And how does Crowley respond? After admirably holding his ground and winning the advantage over the thrashing Gates and the idiotic Obama, Crowley suddenly gets the idea of having a friendly social get together with the man who has poured ordure all over him. What’s wrong with the man? Doesn’t he have any self-respect?
So I can’t see anything good about this.
Roland D. writes:
“What’s wrong with the man? Doesn’t he have any self-respect?”
It seems obvious he was ordered to attend by his chain of command in the Cambridge PD. Whereas I would resign rather than be forced into such obsequious groveling, it might not be such an easy decision for someone with a family to support and not much in the way of savings and/or job prospects in the current economic environment.
LA replies:
But the idea of the meeting was Crowley’s, he brought it up during his phone conversation with Obama.
Roland replies:
I don’t think so. I think he made an off-hand remark about it, and
the Obama people decided to take him up on it.
LA writes:
From Politico:
Crowley even told reporters later that he and Gates had agreed to meet again—this time, not over a beer. He called the day “an effort not just to move the city of Cambridge or two individuals past this event, but the whole country beyond this and toward some meaningful discussion in the future.”
After the event, Crowley characterized the discussion as “two gentlemen who agreed to disagree on a particular issue. We didn’t spend too much time dwelling on the past. We spent a lot of time discussing the future.”
It sounds as if Crowley has been taken over by the Pods.
What’s next? Maybe he and Gates will team up and tour the country on behalf of racial understanding. Which in Gates’s treatment will mean: “We blacks acknowledge the stresses of being a police officer, and you whites admit that white racist ‘justice’ is keeping down the black man in America.”
Anna writes:
I, too, was very leery about this so-called “beer summit.” Stayed away from all the comments, conjectures, and preparations for the event.
Saw our local late-night news showing Mr. Crowley at the podium, post-summit, saying there were no apologies. This was followed by a screen with a written quote from Obama that began with—“I have always believed that what brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart.”
My initial impression from this snippet of information is that Mr. Crowley is intelligently and graciously holding his ground. Obama is shedding his cloak of “post-racial president” and continues couching his comments with a racial overtone. It appears that Mr. Crowley is both articulate and photogenic. He may also be a better diplomat than most of us who post here. I will, therefore, reserve judgment.
As for lemon, lime, and beer? Don’t drink it, don’t know it, don’t understand the nuances of the choices. But I have on rare occasion enjoyed a good ale!
LA replies:
“… Mr. Crowley at the podium, post-summit, saying there were no apologies.”
Well, of course he’s not going to apologize. The point is, they owe him an apology, and he’s not demanding one. The police unions called on Obama to apologize, he didn’t, then Crowley proceeded to accept Obama’s invitation. And as for Crowley’s skills as a diplomat, I would say that under the circumstances diplomacy is the last thing that is needed. He wasn’t being a diplomat in the days prior to the White House invitation. He was holding his ground, and doing very well. It was when he started being a diplomat that he lost it.
July 31
Howard Sutherland writes:
True. This was a great opportunity lost. Crowley is giving these two con-men a fig leaf, when we had such a rare opportunity to see the two naked emperors of aggrieved negritude as they really are.
I guess that’s what too much training as a sensitivity trainer will do for you. Perhaps this is how we should have expected this to end, given that it is the Cambridge, Mass. PD that’s involved. (Is there a town in America more in thrall to toxic liberalism than Cambridge, home of Harvard?). Nevertheless, a disappointment after the way Crowley seemed to stand fast.
Moving beyond Crowley himself, it’s another example of how, in a society ruled by liberalism, traditional institutions cannot be trusted to be true to their natures. You have covered this problem, but examples that always strike me are churches that will not teach their faith, but instead call for death of their own societies through leftist social engineering and the disappearance of their home countries through mass incompatible immigration; armed forces more concerned with being welfare agencies for hostile foreigners than defending our country, more focused on providing “opportunities for minorities and women” than selecting and training the best warriors, and whose nominal warriors celebrate the atrocity of sending women to fight in our overseas interventions; and police departments obsessed with understanding—and hiring and promoting—unruly minorities rather than preventing crimes and catching crooks. In short, liberalism makes everything in society, except individual consciences capable of resistance, unreliable when not actually harmful.
Is there anything liberalism does not pervert?
LA replies:
This is exactly right. Liberalism turns society, and every institution within it, into its own opposite and nemesis. Thus the liberal Cambridge Police Department, instead of releasing Crowley’s report which would have disproven the massive lies that were being spread, declined to release it, allowing the whole country to go on believing lies that could easily have been refuted. Thus George W. Bush would allow liberals to tell damaging lies about him. Thus Western nations allow themselves to be trashed as racist. Once liberalism takes over an individual, or an institution, or a whole society, that institution or society seeks to undermine and destroy itself.
The old joke, a liberal is a person who will not take his own side in arrgument, is true. That statement makes no sense to conservatives who see liberals fanatically taking their own side in an argument and attacking conservatives. The statement needs to be understood. Sometimes liberals won’t take their own side, like the Cambridge Police Department or GW Bush. Sometimes liberals love themselves and put down their society or the unenlightened people in their society. Either way, liberals allow themselves or their society to be put down. For example, whether the liberal is guilty and feels that he himself is racist, or whether the liberal is an elite who thinks that he is cool and that other whites are racist, either way he is putting down whites as racist. The self-hatred takes different forms, but they are all part of one continuum. . .
Chris H. writes:
One thing we might have to admit after viewing the beer fest yesterday: Obama cannot be a practicing Moslem since he consumed an alcoholic beverage. I think he has Moslem sympathies though.
Howard Sutherland writes:
In the case of white liberals attacking their own heritage and culture and empowering those truly don’t wish them well, at the risk of sounding Marxist might one say they are suffering from false-consciousness?
That’s certainly the feeling I had last year among tax-paying, degreed white people who were enthusiastic supporters of the Mulatto Messiah’s carefully unspecified “Hope” and “Change.” They will have their reward. Unfortunately, the rest of us will have it with them.
Joseph Kay writes:
Let me give a different take on the beer incident. “Let’s have a few beers and talk about it” is something closely associated with working class whites, people who make up the police force etc.
It is, as they say, a stereotype and thus true. I’ve never heard of any blacks, let alone “distinguished” ones like Gates and Obama, use this expression or even imagine them settling issues “over beers.” Obama was thus jumped in to use the language that would, hopefully, resonate with Crowley (and other working class whites) though Crowley had apparently initially suggested it. (Actually, the expression is often not to be taken literally, sort of saying “let’s smoke the peace pipe” or “bury the hatchet”). There is more than a hint of condescending paternalism in his choice of “solutions.”
If I were Crowley, I would have requested malt liquor, a giant can too or, better yet, a half pint of MD 20/20 wrapped in a plain paper bag. (MD is a cheap fortified wine popular with lower class blacks and the MD stands for “Mogan David” and is kosher).
Imagine JFK inviting MLK to the White House to chat about race relations over watermelon and fried chicken? Will Abe Foxman be invited to discuss Israel over lox and bagels? That would be too obviously insulting.
Ben W. writes:
In criticizing Officer Crowley’s appearance at the Obama beerfest, aren’t VFR’ers missing the fact that Crowley said he supports President Obama 100 percent? Reading between the lines, I gather that Crowley voted for Obama.
How did Crowley become suddenly a poster boy for conservative police support? Isn’t that rather like Palin having become a conservative icon? It was Crowley who first suggested the beer summit that Obama quickly agreed to. Do you think it was an accident that Crowley was picked by his black superior to teach police cadets about racial profiling?
Ray G. writes:
Off topic, but Microsoft’s homepage, which many younger adults use as their personal homepage, uses MSNBC as its news outlet. Everyday, it features left-wing views and has pictures of ordinary people, who are usually 90 percent non-white. They go out of their way not to show Caucasians. It’s almost funny.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 30, 2009 08:07 PM | Send
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