Thad McCotter to introduce House resolution demanding Obama apologize to Crowley

A dumb idea any way you slice it. It won’t pass; if it did pass, it’d set a precedent of Congress trying to wrist-slap the president every time he acts like a jerk to score political points; and in fine Republican tradition, it unnecessarily makes a partisan issue out of what was a useful unenforced error by the other side. You don’t need a House resolution to glean the point made by Harry Stein:

With each such [“teachable moment”], however, fewer and fewer of us are playing along. This time, more than ever, we’re learning other lessons. One of them: for all the talk from his starry-eyed acolytes, in the media and elsewhere, about Obama’s being “post-racial,” the president clings to the discredited and deeply damaging view of America as fundamentally racist, seeing his fellow blacks as perpetual victims justifiably suspicious of cops and other establishment authority figures. So when it comes to race, it’s facts be damned. Indeed, while Obama is so famously cautious and deliberative it took him months to decide on the family dog, his now-infamous off-the-cuff comment on the stupidity of the Cambridge police made it clear that on this issue, the former community organizer wholeheartedly embraces the black victim/racist cop trope.

I’m not so sure this is a problem of The One seeing America as “fundamentally racist” — his own election argues rather strongly to the contrary — as it is him being cynical enough to pander to his base with a paint-by-numbers narrative about racial profiling when put on the spot. For every one instance of heartfelt leftist outrage at genuine racism there are five instances of manufactured outrage at behavior that’s arguably not racist but which can be dishonestly spun that way to the left’s advantage. Barry was just playing the game.

If you missed the audio of the 911 call in Gates’s arrest that was released today, you’ll find it in the sidebar here. The caller, Lucia Whalen, never says the men breaking into the house next door were black (only that one might be Hispanic); Crowley claimed she told him that when the cops got there but she insists that she didn’t. Hmmm.