Night and Day

I still can’t get over the difference between the two American Presidents. It’s like night and day.

The other day we all found out that, in 2002, the Bush Administration had seriously considered allowing the MILITARY to arrest American citizens on American soil.

Wow.

Dick Cheney was pushing the idea — naturally — of military action against Americans so that they could be categorized as “enemy combatants” and thus denied their fundamental rights as citizens. The use of military against American citizen is a violation of liberty that the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits.

At the same time, we have another scandal with the current President, also regarding the issue of citizens’ protections against unreasonable arrests in their own homes — though in this case by the police, not the military. Last week, police arrested a famous and respected African-American Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his own home.

Here’s what happened: he had returned from a trip to China at night and the front door was stuck. He was trying to get the door open when a neighbor called the cops. By the time the cops arrived, he was already inside his home. The cop asked him to step outside. The professor refused. THIS IS A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT of American citizens. The cop can’t come into your home without a warrant. The professor let the cop inside. The cop asked the professor to prove that he lived there. The professor said he showed the cop his I.D.; the cop says he didn’t. A lot more cops showed up. The professor was finally arrested. What was the charge? “Disorderly conduct.” Because it was now obvious that the old man (yes, he is also an old man, who walks with a cane) did NOT break into someone’s house.

Obama said the police in this case acted “stupidly”. The controversy — as far as the President was concerned, for there are obviously more — was over whether the President should have stepped in and taken sides on this issue without having been there and knowing all the facts of the case.

All I know is, I much prefer this President to the last one, for reasons such as … well, ALL of them? He’s in touch with what’s going on in America? With human beings? He’s not a war criminal? He knows how to articulate intelligent thoughts? His sense of humor is many levels above that of a frat boy’s?

Here’s the President’s press conference about the Gates incident. The part I love comes around :56.

President Bush, on the other hand, often demonstrated a different sense of humor.

The one who gets the last word on the Gates case is the great American comedian Dave Chappelle. It’s as if he’s predicted the incident years before it happened. Or maybe it’s just because Chappelle knows that it happens all the time.