Take This Beer and Shove It
The professor, the policeman and the president hope to share a beer at the White House this week.
The gathering may help President Barack Obama write a sudsy but happy ending to an arrest that triggered a fierce debate over race relations and briefly knocked him off his stride.
…
Obama phoned Crowley, who suggested the three men sit down for a beer at the White House. The president said he liked the idea, and Gates reportedly concurred when Obama phoned him next.
But what to serve? Crowley apparently likes Blue Moon beer. Gates favors Red Stripe or Beck’s. Don’t look for Obama to order a similar high-priced brand, however.
“The president had a Budweiser at the All-Star Game,” Gibbs told reporters, hinting at Obama’s likely choice.
Ah, yes, the middle-class, mid-priced working man’s brew, for a president who once drew snickers for musing about arugula in middle-America Iowa.
Oh, I get it! Irish cop, gotta love the suds, right? Better make it a Guinness. By that logic, order up a 40-ounce Colt 45 for da professa and white wine spritzer for the C-in-C.
This is absurd!
The profilers in this story were, it saddens me to say, all black men: Gates, Obama, and our own Governor Deval Patrick. It started with Gates himself, somehow channeling both Thurston Howell III and Tawana Brawley, to smear a generic “white cop” with the charge of not knowing whom he was messing with. The other two just piled on without looking or thinking. (Anybody seen Al Sharpton since the first day, by the way? “I’ve heard of driving while black, and I’ve heard of shopping while black. But I’ve never heard of living in a home while black…. At worst it could be profiling.” What happened to that guy?)
We feel somewhat possessive of this story, since it occurred locally and since we were among the first to link to it and among the first to cry foul. I even rolled up next to a Cambridge policeman the other day to ask him to relate our support to Sgt. Crowley.
But it’s gone international, which is fine with us. It’s all yours, fellas. Bottoms up.
PS: If I were Sgt. Crowley, I’d belly up to the White House bar and order me one of these:
It’s local and it’s named after a patriot, so they might have to bring it in special to this White House.