How Obama sees the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest

Barack Obama ought to be ashamed, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review. Even though the president admitted he didn't know the facts in the case, he said the police officers who arrested prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. "acted stupidly" (watch Obama comment on the Gates case). Any lawyer, and certainly one who's president of the United States, should know better than to contribute to the "racializing" of this case before the facts are established—especially when doing so means attacking hardworking police officers.

Thank you, National Review, for the predictable outrage on behalf of "an aggrieved white America," said Matthew Yglesias in Think Progress. But Obama was merely stating the obvious. "I would say that any time you wind up arresting a guy on charges stemming from an alleged break-in to his own house and then drop the charges, that by definition you’re acting stupidly."

Obama "stopped short of accusing the police department of racial profiling," as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has done, said Helene Cooper in The New York Times. But the question on the Gates case—asked during Obama's health-care reform news conference—gave the president a chance to openly address "an issue of deep concern to African-Americans."

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