I have to say for a long time I have been fairly ambivalent towards Glenn Beck. We may be on two wildly different sides of the political spectrum but he seems, at the least, somewhat funny and I can appreciate funny. My ambivalence toward him, however, has recently turned to annoyance when, on an episode of Fox and Friends, he called our President “a racist.” This is not the trickery of political jargon nor editorial skill on my part. To the contrary he could not have made himself clearer.

 

To quote Mr. Beck:

 

“This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep ceded hatred for white people or the white culture. But you can’t sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff and not have it wash over. What kind of president of the United States immediately jumps on the police? Just like what kind of president would ever say ‘Oh, well, yeah, he was black of course he was breaking into the house.’ You’d never do that!”

 

Several words from a host and then follows:

“This guy has a social justice. He is going to set all of the wrongs of the past right.”

 

Brian Kilmeade, another co-host then responds to Beck, "Listen, you can't say he doesn't like white people. David Axelrod's white, Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff is white. I think 70 percent of the people that we see every day are white. Robert Gibbs is white."

 

Mr. Beck then continued, “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. He has a- This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

 

It may be simple to denounce Beck as a madman offhand, but let’s not. Let’s instead analyze Mr. Obama’s answer to prove Mr. Beck dead wrong.

 

To properly analyze this, let’s not only look at Mr. Obama’s answer but also the question that prompted it. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times asks: “What does that [Gates] incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?” Mr. Obama, therefore, had to answer a question dealing with race.

 

After giving a brief account of the events he moved on to answer the question first stating the following: “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts what roll race placed in that…” It seems hard to gather anything racial about the proceeding given this. It would seem case closed.

 

But, he did not stop there, Mr. Obama courageously went further and addressed the latter part of Ms. Sweet’s answer but first said, “… what I think we know separate and apart from this incident, there is a long history of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

 

Even if one was to agree that Mr. Obama was incorrect with the “acted stupidly” remark – which one should not- it is fairly simple to discern that the racial commentary and the Gates remark remained two separate talking points within the discourse

 

While the jury seems to still to be out on whether or not this was a racial issue – the 911 calls were just released and the caller never mentioned the word “black” nor “African American” – the jury seems to quickly be coming to the consensus that, while Mr. Gates should have showed a bit more respect to the police officer (Asking, “Do you know who I am?”, regardless of race will always make the situation worse), the arrest was indeed stupid.

 

My opinion on the whole matter? I will have to agree with an article by Christopher Hitchens on the Slate website on July 27th. Mr. Hitchens says “The president should certainly have kept his mouth closed about the whole business… but once he had said that the police conduct was "stupid," he ought to have stuck to it...”

 

Plainly put, Mr. Obama was not wrong.