The Gates Thing Again...

CNN provided an article that asks a salient question. The title is about conservatives and their ability to be consistent, but the bulk of the article is about the Henry Louis Gates affair. In the interest of full disclosure I should say I read a book by Professor Gates once and understood it...

I should also say I'm about as moderate as you can get. I purposefully ask for directions to the middle of the road on just about every issue. In any event, a friend of mine who is quite a bit more liberal asked me recently about politics and the conservative ideology and I said, listen to Rush Limbaugh. We listened together right after the Gates thing exploded and I predicted Rush would be on the side of Prof. Gates. Man's home is his castle, government intrusion, etc. Then Rush came on and gave me the exact opposite of what I expected. It was all Gates's fault, the police were in the right even though the full details aren't disclosed. According to Rush Limbaugh, apparently, a man's home is not his castle, the police have a right to be in your living room even after you've proven you're in your own home, and the police have a right to arrest you if you're not fawning when you ask them to leave.

Now I wonder, if Professor Gates had a fully licensed and permitted handgun in his hand when he answered the door what would Mr. Limbaugh (and the NRA) think about arresting him? He certainly would have appeared more threatening, no? Would Rush have said he had no right to have a firearm? Sounds like it. Of course, if Officer Crowley had knocked on Mr. Limbaugh's door with the same questions, and Mr. Limbaugh somehow wound up arrested, I assume his next show would have been filled with mea culpas and explanations about why he (Limbaugh) had acted so badly...

Of course, as the article does mention, neither side has a monopoly on inconsistency. Any way the wind blows seems to be the slogan for both sides. It's to be expected - the world is a pretty complicated place. Liberals want the government to regulate everything except marijuana. Conservatives want the government to deregulate everything except marijuana... Gets confusing.