Chris Matthews just said on Hardball that Barack Obama's initial comments about the Gates arrest was a case of “profiling”:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: “He was profiling in a sense. The president. He was looking at it as a classic case, he thought. ... I mean, he was profiling the situation. He was saying 'This is a situation I'm familiar with, therefore I know what happened.' He doesn't know what happened.”

Except that isn't what happened. Not at all. What actually happened is that Barack Obama said, very clearly, that he did not know what happened in this situation, or whether race played a role. Here, take a look at Obama's exact words:

BARACK OBAMA: “I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that.”

How is Matthews able to get away with such a gross distortion? Easy: When he plays video of Obama's Gates comments, he leaves that part on the cutting-room floor.

That's spectacularly dishonest.