Tucker Carlson, on Henry Louis Gates:

What happened to him likely had little to do with race, but it's still appalling. His crime? Failing to be polite to a policeman. Except that's not a crime, or shouldn't be, and the rest of us ought to do all we can to make sure it doesn't become one.

I have no idea how much, if at all, race played a role in Gates' arrest, so I won't endorse Carlson's assessment of its likelihood. But the rest of Carlson's statement seems spot-on, and illustrates the way the media mishandled this story.

See, Barack Obama said all along that he didn't know if race played a role in the arrest. And he said the arrest was stupid anyway. That's almost self-evident -- Gates was arrested in his own home, and charges against him were dropped.

But the media pretended that Obama had said something hugely controversial -- and they did so by ignoring the fact that he had gone out of his way to make clear that he was not saying race played a role in this specific arrest. They just disappeared that part of his comments, and often suggested the opposite.

Had the rest of the media approached this the way Tucker Carlson did -- understanding that it's completely obvious that Gates shouldn't have been arrested -- their coverage would have been much better.

On the other hand, Carlson describes Gates as a “self-righteous whiner who probably cries racism every time he gets the wrong order at Starbucks.” I tend to assume that if any 58-year-old African American had spent his life “crying racism” every time he encountered it (let alone every time he got the wrong cup of coffee) there would be enough examples to fill a book. As that isn't the case with Gates, Carlson's assessment of the professor seems ... odd.

Questioned by a reader about that description of Gates, Carlson pointed to a statement in Gates' Yale application. I'm reasonably sure that by 1970, Henry Louis Gates had experienced racism more significant than getting the wrong order at Starbucks, and almost as sure that Tucker Carlson knows this. When a reader pointed that out, Carlson took issue with Gates' use of the word “Whitey” in that application. Seems a little silly for a wealthy white man in 2009 to get so upset about a black man who grew up in a segregated town using the word “Whitey” 40 years ago, but that's Tucker Carlson for you.