Obama: "The Cambridge police acted stupidly." July 24, 2009
Here's President Obama's opinion on the incident during his Health Care Reform presentation:
Interesting how he would offer such an opinion to the world when he prefaced his opinion by saying that he didn't have all the facts.
Have you seen the official police report (250k PDF), and what Cambridge PD Sgt. James Crowley reported from the scene? Who was acting stupidly?
Tony's Note: When being investigated by a law enforcement officer in the course of his or her duty, and you yell at the officer, "Do you know who you're messing with?" My friend, you have just placed one foot squarely on a banana peel.
Update2: Obama: "Come on over to the White House for a beer!"
I can’t think of something I would rather NOT do, if I was Sgt. Crowley!!! “Yeah, come on over for a nice 'relaxing beer' while the racist professor eyes you up like you are the devil…”
July 24, 2009 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Friday he should have chosen his words more carefully when he said police "acted stupidly" in arresting a prominent black Harvard scholar, touching off a debate over race.
Obama made his comments after talking on the telephone to Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer who made the arrest, and discussing inviting Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to the White House for a beer.
"Because this has been ratcheting up and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up, I wanted to make clear in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically," Obama said. "And I could have calibrated those words differently."
By the way, Obama's joke about getting shot? Remember when Michelle Obama said on 60 Minutes that, "...you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know..."
Shot by whom, Michelle? Cops? Just for being black? Sheesh...
