About half the readers think Gates is hilariously in the wrong. The other half, give or take, think that the cop was transparently to blame for the whole mess. That's a gross generalization of several dozen e-mails, but I think it reflects how conservatives, like Americans generally, are of two views when it comes to cops. One side is inclined to distrust them, see them as potential abusers of authority — mere men with badges and guns...Goldberg doesn't provide any examples of conservatives who back Gates, which just shows how lazy he is, since such "examples" could be easily produced if Goldberg would unclog his piehole long enough to order an intern to create them. (Needless to say, Goldberg himself does not back Gates, whom he thinks was "trying to bully the cop.")
If Goldberg had to mine the blogosphere for examples, though. this would have been much harder to manage. I have been all over the rightwing blogs and have seen very, very few conservatives who thinks Gates was in the right (Tigerhawk is about the best of these). A few reluctantly accept that Gates might be telling the truth. (Goldberg's colleague Robert VerBruggen accepts that the arrest was absurd, but sourly adds, "Now, I'm sure, Harvard will be holding all sorts of special counseling sessions for everyone to whine some more," as if Gates were pulling some mau-mau bullshit by being in the right.)
Most of the brethren take the attitude of American Power -- that Gates should have been grateful that the police were diligent enough to arrest him, and that his complaints prove that he is racist against white people. VDARE agrees: "if anyone was being a racist here, it’s Gates." When they hear another famous black person is involved, they really go crazy ("Big Mouth Al Sharpton Has a New Friend").
BitsBlog goes further and asks if Gates is actually a scholar. He is angered that people refer to him as "the nation’s pre-eminent black scholar," and (for want of a better word) explains:
Adolf Hitler was purposed to have dismissed Albert Eintien’s Jewish Theory of Relativity, as if atoms recognized ethnic bounds. Like atoms do not recognize ethnicity, neither does scholorship. If a person is indeed a scholar there no need to preface ths distincton. It is not like truth is the least biet dependant on race.No wonder the cop found Gates' Harvard ID insufficient.
So when the Associated Press describeS Henry Louis Gates Jr as a black scholar, you have wonder about Gates scholarship.
Many conservatives also mention they never would have said such harsh things to officers of the law as Gates said, which sort of conflicts with their self-image as tea-party revolutionaries in the mold of Nathan Hale.
As a general rule, you may on occasion see these people speak against official overreach if their own kind is subject to it. But it is rare that you see them deliver any of this libertarian, anti-statist love to a liberal -- and vanishingly rare that you see them give it to a black person, for some reason I just haven't for the life of me been able to figure out.
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