Via Mediaite, something to start the conversational ball rolling at that not-all-awkward White House drink-up on Thursday.
Mediaite has obtained a transcript from former Sec. of State Colin Powell’s interview on CNN’s Larry King Live tonight, in which Powell comments on the Professor Gates story, as well as Sarah Palin and more…
“I would say, the first teaching point is when you’re faced with an officer trying to do his job and get to the bottom of something. This is not the time to get in an argument with him. I was taught that as a child. You don’t argue with a police officer. In fact, in our schools today, in order to make sure that we don’t have things escalate out of control and lead to very unfortunate situations, we tell our kids, when you’re being asked something by a police officer, being detained by a police officer, cooperate. If you don’t like what happened, or if you think that you have been exposed to something that’s racist or prejudicial or something that’s wrong, then you make a complaint afterwards and you sue him.”
Prudent advice for the average person (especially if the cop’s gun is drawn, needless to say) since the average person may find himself powerless against agitated police, but if a nationally known figure who knows his rights can’t talk back to a cop in his own home, what rights does he have, really? I’m squarely in the Hitchens and Herzog camp on this, as any libertarian should be. The proper objection to Gates isn’t that he was rude to a cop, which is perfectly legal if boorish; it’s that he and our Post-Racial President assumed bad faith and demagogued the race angle by suggesting it was a case of profiling when it almost certainly wasn’t. Less worrying about arguing with police officers and more worrying about race-baiting to score cheap political points, please.
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