Dowd: Bite YOUR Tongue

Maureen Dowd has devoted her column in today's New York Times to casting aspersions on Sgt. James Crowley.

When liberal queen bee Dowd isn't twisting the truth and getting the facts wrong, she's completely making things up.

She's a lot like Obama that way.

In "Bite Your Tongue," Dowd slobbers all over Henry Louis Gates Jr.

She's quick to say that she's the daughter of a police detective. I suppose Dowd believes that gives her words more weight. Just as Dowd said that Cindy Sheehan's opinion on Iraq had more validity than President Bush's position because "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute," I'm sure Dowd believes that the "moral authority of the daughter of a cop is absolute" as well.

Well, it's not.

Dowd declares:

No matter how odd or confrontational Henry Louis Gates Jr. was that afternoon, he should not have been arrested once Sergeant Crowley ascertained that the Harvard professor was in his own home.

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted. His soothing assessment that two good people got snared in a bad moment seems on target.

It escalated into a clash of egos — the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar, the town vs. the gown, the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Dowd suffers from the same affliction as Obama -- an ego so massive that it clouds judgment, rooted in a profound arrogance, resulting in the spouting of asinine remarks.

Just as Obama made a fool of himself by saying the "Cambridge police acted stupidly," Dowd is doing the same thing.

Dowd is as biased as Obama, maybe more. She only talked to Gates and relays his account as if it's indisputable. Dowd didn't bother to talk to Crowley.

No bias there, right?

...Gates told me Crowley was so “gruff” and unsolicitous “the hair on my neck stood up.” Crowley says Gates acted “put off” and “agitated.” But the strong guy with the gun has more control than the weak guy with the cane. An officer who teaches racial sensitivity should not have latched on to a technicality about neighbors — who seemed to be outnumbered by cops — getting “alarmed” by Gates’s “outburst.”

Don't you just love Dowd's lecture on what a police officer should and shouldn't do? She should be teaching at the police academy.

Dowd argues that Gates is a weak guy with a cane and didn't have a gun.

So what? That's irrelevant. Police arrest unarmed people all the time.

Dowd bends over backwards to excuse Gates' behavior. Why?

What's really inexcusable is Dowd's deception. This woman either is too lazy to check her facts or she is intentionally disregarding that which doesn't fit.

She writes:

...Race, class and testosterone will always be a combustible brew. Our first African-American president will try to make the peace with Gates (who supported Hillary) and Crowley (whose father voted for Obama).

On the subject of Hillary, Dowd is woefully incomplete and gives the reader an entirely wrong impression.

Gates talked about Hillary and Obama in a 2008 article that appeared in Martha's Vineyard Magazine. Here's what Dowd didn't tell -- the truth:

Q: Is it true that you “flipped” from supporting Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama?

GATES: The Clintons are very dear friends of mine. I pledged my full personal support to Senator Clinton long before I’d ever heard of Barack Obama, in hopes that she would run for president. I thought she ran a brilliant race, and I feel her disappointment. There was only one person who could have defeated her, and that was Barack Obama.

I’ve talked to Obama several times, and I like and admire him. I’ve made the maximum allowable contribution to his candidacy. He’s been on the Vineyard two summers in a row, and I hope that that continues.

I think that either of them would be a great president. Because of the luck of the draw, Barack has won. In the best of all possible worlds, they would be on the ballot together in the fall. I think they would be a powerful ticket. It’s historic anyway, just having Barack at the head of the ticket, but imagine how much more historic it would be to have a black man and a white woman running for the president and vice president of the United States. I mean, my Lord, we’d kill two birds with one stone.

Q: Are you surprised to see an African American with a real chance at being president?

GATES: A year ago, I thought it was highly unlikely that a black man would get the nomination. I had no question about Obama’s qualifications, but I questioned whether our fellow Americans were ready for him. It’s one thing to win Martha’s Vineyard; it’s another to win West Virginia. Barack has a lot of work to do with white working-class Americans who have expressed reservations, through their votes, about his candidacy. But if anybody can do it, it’s him. He’s got the magic touch. He’s brilliant and charismatic, and he’s tough.

While Gates did initially support Hillary, he abandoned her for Obama. Dowd leaves that little fact out of her column.

In addition, Gates hosted a fundraiser for Obama at his home on Martha's Vineyard when Obama was running for the Senate.

For Dowd to assert that Gates supported Hillary for president is extremely misleading. She fails to say that Gates supported Hillary before he threw his support against her.

It's typical of Dowd to be factually inaccurate in her columns, but this one is really glaring, inexcusable. I don't think it's a factual error. I think it's more of a lie.

Dowd seems to find Gates just adorable, so witty.

...How can they ever reconcile their accounts? Crowley says he asked Gates to come outside and the professor replied, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Gates wryly suggests Crowley got the line from watching “Good Times” as a child.

“Does it sound logical that I would talk about the mother of a big white guy with a gun?” he asked. “I’m 5-7 and 150 pounds. I don’t walk on ice, much less (expletive) with some cop in my kitchen. I don’t want another hip replacement.”

I asked how he felt when he learned that Crowley was the one who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Reggie Lewis, the black Celtics basketball star, in a vain attempt to save his life after a heart attack in 1993. He replied: “I don’t stereotype. I never saw him as the head of the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe he was just having a bad day.”

What a charmer! Gates has such a wry sense of humor. His salty language is so cute. What's not to love?

And Gates says that if anyone thinks he’s a fiery black militant, they’ve got the wrong guy, considering he married a white woman, has mixed-race daughters and has white blood himself.

Again, irrelevant.

Gates was the guy who was yelling about being "a black man in America." That doesn't sound like a mild-mannered post-racial guy to me

No, Gates played the race card, and he definitely does stereotype.

In that way, he's a lot like Dowd and Obama.