This piece is a work of incoherence. It only adds to the current American compulsion to see race at the bottom of everything, and of course everyone but Cockburn fails the test of political correctness when it comes to that. Sometimes you nail it Cockburn, but not this time.

For one thing, it is perhaps more racist for someone like you to perpetuate the notion that race was entirely at the bottom of the Gates/Crowley incident, as well as the entire history of civilization leading up to it, than it was for Crowley supporters to back their man. All they were doing was supporting their own, as cops and their fellow travelers tend to do, regardless of the sin committed.

The Gates/Crowley incident was only about race because racists of all stripes were looking for yet another event to label as a racial incident. You of all people should know this.

Gates mouthed off at his own home as he had every right to do, whether or not it was a prudent thing to do. Crowley had no business taking Gates in when he knew Gates had committed no crime. It was all about Crowley's pride, and it was an incredibly poor example of cop behavior for a cop trainer of all people to be modeling. But none of that had to be about race, and we will never really be able to tell if it was.

The fact is, the same thing could have happened white on white, black on black, or even black on white. What would the racial political-correctness quarterbacks have done with any of those scenarios? The issue was abuse of power and lack of professionalism by the cop exercising it, not race. Until Gates and the rest of the pilers on made it the issue, that is, and they succeeded in doing so to the point that all the racial claptrap obliterated any chance for those trying to make sense of the news to get the real point.

Gates was entitled to be a hothead at the moment, when he had just gotten home and was under no obligation to be rational or polite. But once he had been released and had an opportunity to cool off, he kept it up and turned the whole thing into a false national finger-pointing contest about racism, when it should have been about something very different.

What if he had exercised some leadership and said something like: "Folks, this was not really about race--it could have happened to anybody. Maybe I lost my cool when I shouldn't have, but I was in my own home and I committed no crime. When a person is in his own home he has no obligation to act like a professional, be polite, or frankly to anything else as far as the police are concerned other than refrain from breaking any law. The officer in this case was a professional and is trained and paid by our tax dollars to act like one while on duty, just as I am expected to act like a professional when I'm on duty. Do we really want a police force that will arrest someone in his own home just to get even when there is no evidence that a crime has been committed? How many times does this kind of thing happen to someone without the clout to make it a national issue?"

What a lesson this all is in how immature and self-destructive folks can get when they decide they just don't want to act like adults.