Obama more bartender than mediator at beer summit
The White House was working hard to lower expectations about Thursday’s beer summit, characterizing the president’s role as more bartender-in-chief than mediator.
So don’t expect apologies or even a rehash of the day Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley, who is white, arrested prominent Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, who is black.
In fact, don’t expect to hear much at all.
“I don’t anticipate sound at the meeting,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “The president is not going to announce anything tonight.”
Crowley busted Gates on a charge of disorderly conduct after a confrontation at the Harvard professor’s home. The policeman had been dispatched to the scene to investigate a report of a possible burglary in progress. Words were exchanged.
The 58-year-old Gates, a well-known documentary filmmaker who walks with a cane as a result of a childhood injury, had returned home from a trip to China to discover his door jammed.
A neighbor saw two men, Gates and his driver, trying to shoulder their way into the house and phoned the police.
Obama and Hannity – beer-drinking buddies?
ELKHART, Ind. – President Barack Obama and conservative commentator Sean Hannity are hardly political allies, but Obama on Monday briefly entertained the thought they could at least share a beer.
At least, Obama seemed to like the beer part.
Hannity, a talk show host who is one of Obama’s harshest critics, offered recently to buy the president a beer after Obama said “hardcore” Hannity fans would not want to share a brew with him.
At a town hall meeting in Indiana where Obama was selling his stimulus package, a woman who identified herself as Tara questioned why some of Obama’s cabinet appointments could not handle their own taxes.
”I’m one of those that thinks you need to have a beer with Sean Hannity,” she said, drawing boos from the pro-Obama crowd.
But Obama called it “a perfectly legitimate question” and took responsibility again for mistakes in the nominating process for some of his Cabinet members.
the plan is tc when bush is out of range the fault will be rush and hannity for spreading false information,that is why the proposer of the fairness document could not get a democratic seconder, they know they are going to be desperate for some one to blame down the road.i can not even get a response on this even from a neophyte like eric but that can be expected.
I am one of the people who like the President, but he sure did make a big mistake in this case. As another contributor has noted, it appears that both the officer and the “suspect” overreacted. Mr. Gates does need to remember that the officer had been dispatched to a possible burglaryt-in-progress, and he really should understand that Crowley likely was a bit hyped up. Years ago I worked in both law enforcement and private security, and any time I was sent on such a call, I felt the way anyone normal does: on high alert. I gather Crowley doesn’t know Gates, so he can hardly be faulted for not recognizing him as the homeowner. On the other hand, once Gates did produce ID showing he was in his own home, Crowley would have been better off to just let the matter drop. Had he done so, there wouldn’t be all this brouhaha about it.