One week ago today, the Cambridge Police Department and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates released a joint statement, with both sides admitting the professor’s arrest was a “regrettable” escalation, and that dropping the charges of disorderly conduct was a “just resolution” to all sides. Both sides had kissed and made up when, hours later, the President accused one side of “acting stupidly” – a statement which, while apparently true, was just as apparently incomplete.
Now, someone has lost their job over it. Lee Landor, an aide to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, criticized Obama’s criticism on Facebook, stating that arresting officer James Crowley was doing his job. In another post, she called Sharptonian racial arsonists to task be questioning the idea that all white people in positions of power are evil racists. According to Stringer’s flack, Landor’s comments “were totally inappropriate and in direct contradiction to the views of the borough president and his office.” I’m not sure what parts of Cambridge, Mass. fall under the jurisdiction of the Manhattan Borough President, but apparently disagreement on this local issue and the national politics surrounding it constituted an irreconcilable difference. Landor was forced to resign today (adding one more to the unemployment rolls).
The President will invite Gates and Crowley to the White House so they can make up “officially” and look like a peacemaker. Crowley will, if he wants it, gain a degree of notoriety as the victim of a witch hunt at the hands of Sharpton and his ilk. And for a professor who heads a department named after a Marxist who renounced his American citizenship, a racially-tinged flap with the police is a guaranteed moneymaker – Gates could make six figures talking at campuses in the next month and never leave Massachusetts. Hopefully, Landor can find a way cash in on her involvement in this controversy as well.
Jim Eltringham 