“We hit it off right from the beginning. When he’s not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy.”

Harvard Prof Henry Louis Gates, after being invited to the White House for a beer with the police officer who arrested him on suspicion of breaking into his own house.

[Source.]

En passant Obama’s original intervention in this fracas was uncharacteristically thoughtless. After all, for a guy who’s been trained as a lawyer to offer an opinion on a controversial encounter while at the same time saying that he didn’t know the facts was, well, idiotic.