Mark Steyn's Take on Gates-gate

Check out Mark Steyn's take on the Gates arrest, published at the National Review Online.

Here's a couple of my favorite parts:

"The latter [the Cambridge police] 'acted stupidly,' pronounced the chief of state. The president of the United States may be reluctant to condemn Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez or that guy in Honduras without examining all the nuances and footnotes, but sometimes there are outrages so heinous that even the famously nuanced must step up to the plate and speak truth to power. And thank God the leader of the free world had the guts to stand up and speak truth to municipal police sergeant James Crowley."

And later:

"As Professor Gates jeered at the officers, 'You don’t know who you’re messin’ with.' Did Sergeant Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I dunno. I wasn’t there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts, or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African-American. A black president, a black governor, and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the 'post-racial America' will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like Professor Gates unto the end of time."

Yeah... It's kind of strange that Obama denounced the Cambridge police (all the while admitting that he didn't know the details, etc.) far faster than he denounced the Iranian crackdown, and the wholesale arrests and killings of Iranian protesters. America is the only country worthy of his snap judgements, apparently. And of course Americans, whether they're doctors portrayed as greedy mercenaries cutting on our children for money or police officers portrayed as racists, are never worthy of Obama's otherwise bountiful apologies.

UPDATE: And check out Legal Insurrection's William A. Jacobson's take on Gates' sudden desire to "move on" (with himself firmly in the driver's seat) after the incident.

My favorite part excerpted from Jacobson: "I know that Obama does not like to use the word 'victory.' But the public needs a victory of truth here. Based upon what I have read, I do not believe that this was a case of racial profiling. But if the truth is that there really was racial profiling going on, then Sgt. Crowley needs to handle the truth, as do I.

"But if the truth is that Prof. Gates made a false accusation of racial profiling, and Obama accepted that false accusation without due inquiry because of Obama's own profiling of the police, then Prof. Gates and Obama need to handle that truth, if they can."

"If they can," indeed. Anyone familiar with Gates' work or has seen him talk (and not smitten with his "message" and prestige), can attest to an almost insurmountable arrogance. A trait shared with Obama. I doubt either is capable of truly admitting they were wrong about much of anything.