"Your defense of Gates is assuming he has rights when he is a suspect."

Not the highlighting of a racist and racially insensitive  and ugly e-mail written by a member of the Boston PD, but the snide and snarky tone that accompanies it, which manages to slime everyone in the police department who wears a uniform.  And, in spite of your denial that this has anything to do with Crowley, everyone knows that many who actually do know Crowley described him as a nice person, so your use of "that nice police officer" is hard to take any other way.

In other words I hope that when an economically underprivileged black male is shot or unduly incarcerated by police, you, BTD (not Jeralyn, because I know she does this), will make ten posts about it...some snarky, some nice.

The fact here, is that a member of your village was pilloried, in your eyes -- you, as a self-proclaimed elitist -- and that's why it makes you so mad, and so "snarky".

Barrett got into hot water after he fired off the note to his buddies in the Guard - and, inexplicably, The Boston Globe.

But Gates brought race into it and now a cop in Boston has responded by exposing himself as a racist.  So he will now lose his job with cause.

Restaurant adds 'Sgt. Crowley burger' to join 'Skip Gates burger' already on menu.

Bartley's Burger Cottage in Harvard Square has had the "Skip Gates burger" -- a teriyaki burger with a grilled pineapple and side of onion rings -- on the menu for several years.

Owner Joe Bartley said Wednesday he's introducing the "Sgt. Crowley burger:" a cheeseburger with grilled onions and gravy french fries.

I never said, in the original comment, or in the later one, anything about sweeping anything under the rug, so I don't know why you would ask me that question, other than because you'd rather respond to an imaginary comment than a real one.

Sure you did. You took offense at the so called snark, which is exactly what makes BTD's comment excellent.

That is what you want swept under the rug. You would prefer that Barret's ugly statement be isolated as something coming from one  "bad apple" and that any generalizing is out of line.

Well I disagree. And I applaud BTD for his "snark". Of course your attempt to write off BTD's "snark" with the hyperbolic statement that what BTD is doing is as

something which manages to slime everyone in the police department who wears a uniform.  

Like the other poster said, this post is beneath you.  I've noticed that with this episode (the whole Gates-Crowley-Obama affair) in particular, your tone has changed a lot.  It's not just snarky.  It's downright mean.  And not mean in a good way where you punish someone that deserves it.  It's mean in a "I've lost all sense of objectivity on this issue" way.  Come on BTD, live up to your name and provide a big tent for the different viewpoints on this issue.  There's room for disagreement here without getting snarky and mean.  That's what I've always respected you for and honestly, why I still read this blog.

I just want to point out that the fact that we're talking about a beer summit confirms the role of class in this whole brouhaha, an issue I raised earlier ("Why class does matter in the Gates arrest debate"). They are not sitting down to share a bottle of wine; the decision to "lower the class bar" by using the alcoholic beverage of the working (class) man is quite purposeful...

[snip]

Of course this is all artifice; Crowley is sitting down with the President of the United States and a superstar scholar from Harvard. Gates and Obama are way above Crowley's station in their professional and social spheres. However, what the Gates incident has taught us is that if you take Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates or any prominent black man out of context--they can still easily and quickly drop well beneath Crowley's station given the right (or more accurately, wrong) circumstances. In the often-disappointing real world colored by perception and stereotypes, it's a rude awakening. If the President and Prof. Gates are anonymized into the average black man, it is still a world of driving while black, voting while black, shopping while black, hailing a cab while black, and now, being in your own home while black that they would experience.