You can take ‘em out of the ghetto but you can’t, I guess, take the ghetto out of these malcontents—even Harvard “scholars”. I mean, the brotha’s even got a street name. The indignant victim “Skip”, by day normally a mild-mannered, urbane and cultured intellectual, suddenly devolves to street thug with bona fide creds, lapsing into sloppy jive slang, railing “yooze don’t know whooze yooze messin’ wit” and “I’ze talk to yo mama, outside”. If his Harvard students could hear him now.

A reasonable person of any ethnic persuasion normally complies with a policeman’s request to see some identification, especially when a concerned neighbor thought your home might be in the process of being burgled by—it turns out—well, you. Had “Skip” displayed a modicum of his Ivy League refinement and calmly explained the embarrassing situation to the hapless police who had only been called to the scene in response to a routine 911 call, there never would have been the brouhaha that ensued. But no, the professor’s knee-jerk reaction was to play the race card and to become in-your-face belligerent, doing his best to impersonate hoodlum Biggie Smalls and creating such a ruckus that a crowd gathered outside to see what all the fuss was about. (The police reports are posted at Smoking Gun’s website.) So the recalcitrant academic was arrested, by the book, for disorderly conduct. Good. Too bad the Cambridge police department later buckled under PC pressure, kowtowing to Al Sharpton’s shakedown, and dropped the charges.

But that wasn’t the end of this sordid affair. It took Mr. Gates less than 24 hours to approach PBS in hopes of brokering a deal to produce a new documentary, this one on racial profiling in Amerika. His daughter is already on the stump, being interviewed on CBS’s The Early Show by the concerned, guilt-ridden and sappy Harry Smith who practically oozed empathy from his pores. And then, ditching His presidential persona, our beloved “post-racial” president, unscripted and instinctively reverting into “community agitator” mode, managed to weigh in during his prime-time press conference. Though admitting “Skip” was His homie and that He didn’t know all the facts of the case, that didn’t stop Barack “Barry” Obama—He’s got a street name, too!—from condemning the Cambridge police officers for acting “stupidly”. This was reminiscent of Representative John Murtha indicting our servicemen in Haifa as “murderers” before he, or anybody else, knew the facts. It took a court, following the legal process of discovery, to uncover those facts—and to exonerate the Marines of the trumped-up charges.

At least Obama’s untoward, precipitous comments about the Gates incident managed to spice up His otherwise dull and pedantic press conference. He seemed much more exorcised over the egregious “travesty” suffered by a brotha, while appearing to be bored with the tedious chore of selling His snake oil to an ever-growing dubious audience.

Perhaps, before the August recess, Congress could get in the act as well and pass legislation that would completely exempt all African-Americans from, for starters, abiding by speed limit laws (unlike the rest of us). This bold initiative—they could call it The Rodney King Act—would simply confirm and codify what multiculturalism and sensitivity training have already taught us: that anytime any black under any circumstances is pulled over by a traffic cop, they are ipso facto victims of racial profiling and liable to be beaten to within an inch of their life, and therefore deserving of special protections benevolently granted by the pantheon on Capitol Hill.

Thank goodness our magnanimous Dear Leader has led us, finally, to the “post-racial” Promised Land.