The Ridiculous Beer Summit

I am honestly and truly disgusted by the overblown coverage of Obama's so-called beer summit. I refuse to fully report it, as I think it's nothing more than a stunt to make Obama look magnanimous despite the fact that he's the one who stoked the racial flames on this one. It's completely ridiculous, and doesn't deserve the excessive coverage it got. If you want to know what's going on, go here.

For my part, I will only echo this sentiment from Powerline about the general subject:

I do have one more reflection on the matter (though not about myself). As "race men" go, Gates has always been viewed as relatively sensible, as opposed to, say, Cornel West. Indeed, as E.J. Dionne reminds us in a worthwhile column, Gates once criticized "race politics" as a "court of the imagination wherein blacks seek to punish whites for their misdeeds and whites seek to punish blacks for theirs, and an infinite regress of score settling ensues."

Barack Obama, for his part, was going to be a post-racial president. As such he would lead us out of the "race politics" Gates (and the rest of us) finds so sterile and counterproductive.

Yet when the rubber met the road, Gates didn't hesitate to level baseless charges of racism in an extremely aggressive manner. And Obama didn't hesitate to attack the white police officer before he had the facts.

This suggests to me that, as far as African-Americans are concerned, "race politics" will continue unabated, as if Obama had never been elected president.

Sadly, this is exactly as predicted by conservatives long before the election.

There's my two cents.