Gates Arrest: Of What Can We Be Certain?

At her Atlantic Correspondents blog, Wendy Kaminer shares her agnosticism with the racial implications of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which have become a major topic of discussion today following President Obama's press conference last night:

You have a constitutional right to talk back to a police officer; and whether Skip Gate's account of his arrest or the police version is closer to the truth, it seems clear that Gate's speech rights were violated and his arrest was illegal. Less clear are the officer's motivations for the arrest.  Naturally, the prevailing assumption and apparent, primary source of Gates' outrage is the belief that the officer, James M. Crowley, is a racist; but that ignores the equally plausible possibility that he's simply a bad cop, (or maybe a not-so-bad cop having a very bad day,) who would also have arrested a late middle-aged white guy whom he deemed insufficiently deferential. (If you find this scenario implausible, you never met my father.)...