…and why it showed up in a press conference about the President’s proposed health care rationing program – OK, I can’t help you there.  But you can get the basic details of the Gates arrest here (via John Lott’s Website).

The scene – two black men on the porch of a stately home on a tree-lined Cambridge street in the middle of the day – triggered events that were at turns dramatic and bizarre, a confrontation between one of the nation’s foremost African-American scholars and a police sergeant responding to a call that someone was breaking into the house.

It ended when Gates, 58, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct in allegedly shouting at the officer; he was eventually taken away in handcuffs.

But the encounter is anything but over. Some of Gates’s outraged colleagues said the run-in proves that even in a liberal enclave like Harvard Square, even with someone of Gates’s accomplishments, a black man is a suspect before he is a resident.

Bolding mine, and there to highlight my sardonic observation:  what do you mean, “even?” Not to be rude about it, but there ain’t no racist like a Bostonian racist*.  Which is not necessarily a knock on the cop; it’s a knock on the neighbor who called the cops on Prof. Gates in the first place.

Moe Lane

*Speaketh the man with numerous – and non-racist – relatives in Massachusetts, most of whom will admit this readily (and ruefully) enough.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.