The university professor is so “insulted” that the president would question his academic performance that he threatens to pack his bags and go to another prestigious university, which is also bidding for his services. Then the piqued professor’s department head gets involved. He takes umbrage at the president’s “insult” to his underling, and strongly hints that the president’s suggestion that the professor live up to his professional billing and improve his teaching performance is really a sneak attack on the school’s affirmative action program. Both professors, as well as a third colleague, make it known they are considering other offers from other Ivy League universities.

Never mind that the African-American studies department at the university in question is one of the oldest, best known and most generously funded in the country. Never mind that both outraged professors are routinely touted in the media (the department head has carte blanche to discourse in the New Yorker and New York Times on black America’s plight), wined and dined by foundations, fawned over at universities, and courted by top politicians and business leaders. Never mind that neither the university president or board of regents has fired or laid off any of the program’s staff or faculty members, cut its funding, or even so much as restricted their use of the copy machine.

Never mind, in short, that there was absolutely no civil rights issue at stake in the clash between Harvard University president Lawrence Summers and showboating professor Cornel West, which even in wartime managed to make national headlines over the recent holiday. Things came to a head New Year’s Day — a bad omen for the civil rights movement in the next 12 months — when Jesse Jackson entered the fray. Black America’s top race man sniffed a chance to grab a headline, and tried to turn the in-house troubles of Harvard University into a race war. He rushed to Cambridge, flanked himself with a handful of local activists, and saber-rattled, threatening Summers with barely veiled hints of protests and boycotts unless he ceased his scrutiny of West and Henry Louis Gates’ Afro-American studies department, and demanded as penance that the university convene a national conference on racial justice and action.

Now, according to the New York Times, the battle is over. Summers has mended fences with his two black stars, and they’re no longer talking about moving to Princeton, one of several universities said to be bidding for their services. Still, the point was made: Question the performance of top black professors, and you’ll have to back down. What was at most an ivory tower squabble became a civil rights battle, and if it sounds like racial correctness once more gone amok, it is.

After all, we’re not talking here about a fight over real issues such as police abuse, failing public schools, the HIV/AIDS crisis, drugs and gangs, or criminal justice system disparities that plague poor blacks. We’re not even talking about a university balking at giving resources to black students, black professors or black studies. It’s not even clearly a fight over academic freedom or free speech, as West hinted it was. He says that Summers chided him for supporting Al Sharpton’s phantom presidential campaign; Summers denies it.

The whole embarrassing spectacle deserves national attention, but not for the reasons Jackson, West and Gates believed. First of all, it’s worth noting that most ethnic studies departments were created via protest, and however worthy their scholarship, ever since their establishment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many have protected their turf from valid scrutiny and criticism by crying race when administrators raise reasonable questions.

And while many professors are rigorous, there have been problems with grade inflation in some ethnic studies departments across the country, not just at Harvard. One of the saddest stories came from the University of California at Berkeley last year, where the vice president for minority outreach was fired after giving two athletes who never took his ethnic studies course credit for it anyway. Too often, ethnic studies departments have been protected from accountability by leaders who play the race card, either for personal gain or to protect mediocrity or incompetence. Now Harvard’s Latinos are demanding a center for Latino studies. Summers will have his hands full, even if the Gates/West brouhaha has really calmed down, for now.

But even more important, this tempest in the ivory tower reflects the fact that most American civil rights leaders appear to be running on empty as they try to advance an agenda to protect the poor and minorities in a post-Sept. 11 America presided over by a wildly popular President Bush. Black leaders like Jackson seem lost in the face of a GOP president now supported by many blacks (though few voted for him); a black community that backs racial profiling of Arab and Muslim Americans even more strongly than whites do; a stubborn recession that’s costing blacks jobs; and Democratic allies who couldn’t muster support for a fair economic stimulus plan. It’s a hell of a lot easier to harass Lawrence Summers than to identify the real cutting-edge civil rights issues in a very changed America, and go to work on them.

The saddest thing of all is that this silly brouhaha fits in with a shopworn pattern: Whenever a black politician, preacher, or in this case a spoiled-brat professor, is called on the carpet for misdeeds or failings, many blacks instantly circle the wagons, turn the tables on their accusers, scream racism, and spin dark tales of white plots and conspiracies to nail them.

That was certainly the case with Jackson, when the news broke that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, kept a mistress, and was accused of paying her hush money to shut up about it. We then saw the sad and pathetic spectacle of black elected officials, civil rights leaders, community activists, and people on the street parading before the cameras offering prayers and pleading for understanding and forgiveness for Jackson. Some even stood Jackson’s profligacy on its head, and praised him for publicly admitting it. Jackson seemed so emboldened by the public outpouring of support that a self-imposed sabbatical from public life, needed, he said, to heal his family, lasted only a weekend.

And it is also the case with West. He has, in fact, sacrificed rigorous scholarship for pop-culture acclaim, and Summers was within his rights as Harvard’s president to raise questions about that. Harvard named him a “University Professor,” its highest faculty post and a title held by only 14 of its 2,200 faculty members, and such status no doubt demands even higher achievement than normally expected. West and Summers may disagree; the popular academic is free to peddle his wares elsewhere. He has at least two of the nation’s top universities vying for his services — Princeton has wanted him back since Gates lured him to Harvard to build his African-American studies “dream team” in 1993. Since the spat became public Summers has insisted he wants dearly to keep him. The two men’s personal troubles are not political. To their credit, many in Harvard’s Afro-American studies department are said to be embarrassed at the fact that a bidding war between Princeton and Harvard has been depicted as a civil rights struggle.

But whites are to blame, too. Wayward black public officials and celebrities get away with their abuses because many whites regard blacks as so far outside the political and social pale that they don’t have to bother to see them as anything other than a racial monolith. White America is profoundly conditioned to believe that all blacks think, act and sway to the same racial beat. They freely use the words and deeds of the chosen black leader as the standard for African-American behavior. When the beleaguered chosen one makes a real or contrived misstep, he or she becomes the whipping boy among many whites, and blacks are blamed for being rash, foolhardy, irresponsible and prone to shuffle the race card on every social ill that befalls them.

The problem is, too often the race card works. Jackson, Gates and West masterfully played the card at Harvard. And it paid handsome dividends for them. Jackson got yet another chance to media grandstand, and a much-needed boost in his frantic quest to reclaim his tarnished throne as black America’s exclusive mouthpiece. West and Gates almost certainly will get an even sweeter deal to stay at Harvard. This was indeed one for the books.

Jan 20: Barack Obama is inaugurated as president.

Feb 17: The president signs the stimulus package into law.

Feb 18: President Obama proposes his mortgage relief plan.

Feb 19: Rick Santelli delivers his rant on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

 Feb 26: The White House releases its bold budget proposal.

Apr 15: Protesters mark Tax Day by attending Tea Party events around the country.

May 26: Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.

May 27: Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comments emerge.

May 27: Newt Gingrich attacks Sotomayor as “racist.”

May 28: The president calls criticisms of Sotomayor “nonsense,” but adds, “I’m sure she would have restated it.”

June 2: Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, calls attacks on Sotomayor “unbelievable” and “vicious.”

June 4: The president delivers his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.

July 1: Unemployment reaches 9.5 percent.

July 13: The Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor.

July 15: Sen. Tom Coburn tells Judge Sotomayor, “You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

July 20: The first notable disruption of a congressional home district meeting occurs, when a Birther hijacks Delaware Rep. Mike Castle’s attempt to discuss healthcare with constituents.

July 20: The arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his Cambridge, Mass. home becomes public.

July 21: The president comments on the arrest in a press conference, saying the police acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates.

July 22: Liz Cheney attempts to justify Birtherism on CNN, saying, “People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”

July 24: Obama says of his comments on the Gates arrest, “I could’ve calibrated those words differently.”

July 28: Birther frenzy reaches an approximate peak.

July 28: The Senate Judiciary Committee votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.

July 29: Obama redoubles his healthcare sales pitch, holding public meetings in Raleigh, N.C., and Bristol, Va.

July 30: Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. Joseph Crowley go to the White House for a beer with the president and vice president.

Aug 3: Members of Congress on recess find hostile, combative crowds at town halls.

Aug 6: The full Senate votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.

Aug 7: Sarah Palin worries, in public, about “death panel” measures in the healthcare reform proposals.

Aug 11: William Kostric brings his 9 mm pistol to the president’s town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H. He carries a sign saying, “It is time to water the tree of liberty” and seems to touch off a trend of bearing arms to town halls.

Aug 22: Obama denounces “outrageous myths” about healthcare reform.

“I read an article where they called my father, ‘sexy cop.’ It was embarrassing,” [Crowley's] daughter said as we sat down for cookies and Coke. ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘He’s pretty cute.’ We laughed as Crowley’s wife rubbed her daughter’s back and reminded her son to mind the gift they had brought for the president.”

The lad gave Obama a Red Sox jersey, a suitable gift for any occasion. In other news, Ms. Gates, mind-reading like so many since this public sitcom began, scrutinized Crowley’s brood and opined, “This wasn’t a family raised on hate.” Professor Gates himself announced, “When he’s not arresting you, Sgt. Crowley is a really likable guy.”

Back in Cambridge, Gates sent flowers to 911 caller Lucia Whalen, whose attorney told Greta van Susteren on Fox News that taking the obstreperous Harvard scholar into custody struck Whalen as justifiable. After getting trashed as a bigot on national television, Whalen herself turned out to be what academicians call “a person of color.” Oops.

In short, Gates, marveling about President Obama’s brilliant plan to get himself off the political hotplate by hosting the beer party (actually, Crowley suggested it), has walked the incident back as far as possible without explaining what combination of circumstances caused him to act so oddly on July 16. That, we’re evidently never going to get.

En route to the White House, Gates somewhat grandiosely told his daughter, “There are approximately 800,000 black men in prison, and on July 16, 2009, I simply became one of them.” Now he’s back at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, pedaling his custom-made 24-speed tricycle to the beach. And more power to him.

Certain members of Gates’ journalistic supporters urge a false-arrest suit. A prediction: That won’t happen, either. Only fools file impulsive lawsuits; the cost is prohibitive, the discovery process unpleasant.

Did Crowley maybe improve minor facts in his much-scrutinized report? Could be. Put it this way: If you’d seen a falling-down drunk skate on a DUI because a 3 a.m. police report called a dark-blue vehicle black (I have), you might edit creatively, too.

It ain’t right, but it’s the way of the world.

One can only hope that Edward Burns (“Sidewalks of New York,” “The Brothers McMullen”) has locked up the movie rights. Not only does Crowley look like his cousin, but wry social farce is what Burns does best. Alternatively, Spike Lee could have wicked fun with yet another racial comedy of errors.

Meanwhile, and here’s the thing, the incident cost the Obama White House almost two weeks in its efforts to pass medical-insurance reform, the most significant social legislation in a generation, while Americans entertained themselves screaming insults at one another.

“It is this vast and militant ignorance,” H. L. Mencken wrote, “this wide-spread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.” The Sage of Baltimore, as he was known, wrote long before the invention of 24/7 satellite news organizations and the Internet.

Here at the sprawling rural campus of Unsolicited Opinions Inc., the one-man, six-dog think tank where this column originates, we experienced a rare sorehead supernova. On the same day the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette printed a signed letter describing your humble, obedient servant here as a hater of Christians and an enemy of God for pointing out that Sarah Palin’s kind of a ditz, anonymous e-mails began to arrive from the professor’s supporters.

“Look you (bleep)ing racist moron,” one fellow suggested, “die in your (bleep)hole called Arkansas.” Someone posting at Salon.com took a similar tack. “You really this ignorant?” one fellow asked. “Or just an ignorant, right-wing, crazy, motherfrolickin’ bastard? KMA Mr. Lyons. Your Southern bias is too lacking in intelligence to bother with a response. This time you have truly revealed your Arkansas roots.”

Not much of a conversation-starter, would you say? As a New Jersey native, where scatological insult’s an art form, I’ve rarely lost a name-calling contest.

But why bother? Argument’s one thing. I thrive on it. But this imbecilic contumely, much encouraged by Internet anonymity, appears to be dividing the nation into feuding cultural tribes too busy feeling sorry for themselves and shrieking insults to comprehend the nation’s gravest problems, much less to solve them.

Oh, and another thing: Woo Pig, Sooie!

It’s not the first time that the most formal home in America has been the backdrop for  a casual meeting of the minds. Here’s a quick trip through a list of our favorites:

• Barack Obama, John McCain and the financial crisis of 2008 — In September 2008, just weeks before the presidential election, with the U.S. economy nearing a seeming financial precipice, Republican presidential candidate John McCain decided on a bold strategy: He suspended his campaign. Then both McCain and Obama met with President Bush at the White House to try to hash out a way to salvage the American economy. Though, the meeting did little to break the partisan stalemate over the economic bailout, it did lead to renewed questions about McCain’s competency.
• Bono and George W. Bush — When you think of odd political-celebrity pairings, President Bush and U2 frontman Bono have to rank near the top. Yet, in 2005, sun-glassed Bono met Bush for lunch in the Oval Office. Bono pressed Bush on providing assistance to the world’s poor as well as expanding outreach programs for those infected with AIDS. However, the meeting didn’t lead to Bono developing an undying affection for the former U.S. president: In 2006, at a prayer breakfast, Bono sidestepped a hug from Bush.
• The baseball strike and Bill Clinton — Hopefully, for the sakes of all parties involved, today’s meeting between Gates, Crowley and Obama goes better than former President Clinton’s attempt to end the 1994-95 baseball strike by calling a summit at the White House in February 1995. Clinton tried to get the warring factions, the players and the owners, to agree to submit to a neutral third-party binding-arbitration process, but he proved unable to persuade the two sides. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, eventually issued a ruling against the owners that ended the strike.
• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict — On September 13, 1993, President Clinton brought together at the White House two men who had long been enemies: Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Prime Minister and Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). While Clinton never achieved a lasting peace settlement between Israel and Palestine, Rabin and Arafat’s symbolic handshake and the peace accord they signed on the White House’s South Lawn at least momentarily provided the world with hope.

• Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan — In 1984, President Ronald Reagan welcomed the King of Pop to the White House. Jackson’s appearance marked the kick-off of a national campaign to counteract underage drunk driving which used Jackson’s song, “Beat It.” Reagan began his speech by saying, “Well isn’t this a thriller.” That wasn’t nearly as bad as the riffs from newscasters who covered the event:
• Willie Nelson and Jimmy Carter — First Lady Michelle Obama recently made news by planting a garden on the White House grounds. But when activist and country music star Willie Nelson performed at the White House on September 13, 1980, he was interested in cultivating a different sort of plant. Carter invited Nelson to sing on the White House’s South Lawn. After the performance, Nelson allegedly snuck up to the White House roof and smoked a joint. The friendship between Nelson and Carter led to Nelson frequently staying over at the White House during Carter’s term. Nelson admitted in his biography that every time he slept at the White House, he lit a “big fat Austin torpedo.”
• Elvis and Nixon — On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley got his wish and had a meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House.  He wanted Nixon to make him a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. According to notes taken by a Nixon aide during the meeting, Presley repeatedly told Nixon of his support for the president, and showed Nixon his wide array of law enforcement memorabilia, including numerous police badges from around the country. He even mentioned to Nixon that he thought the Beatles promoted an anti-American spirit.
• Sammy Davis Jr. and JFK — This was the meeting that wasn’t. According to his 1989 autobiography, “Why Me?”, Davis, an iconic singer and performer was supposed to be at the White House in 1961 to participate in the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. However, at the last minute, Kennedy asked Davis not to attend because Davis had recently married actress May Britt. Kennedy was worried that having the interracial couple at his inauguration would arouse the ire of Southern voters. Davis Jr. was so upset by the slight he went on to support Nixon in the 1970s.

Alas, the average professor can be awfully hard to bring down off his high horse. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was just back from a trip to China. So he probably hadn’t heard a story that moved on the wires that morning about five Jersey City cops gunned down by a perp who’d hidden a shotgun under his bathrobe. One died, along with the shooter and his girlfriend.

Chances are that Crowley, who answered a possible burglary-in-progress call at Gates’ home in Cambridge, Mass., that afternoon, knew about it. Cops notice stories like the Jersey City shooting. They’re a reminder that even small, seemingly inoffensive fellows can shoot you graveyard dead.

“We don’t know precisely what was going through Crowley’s mind,” concedes New York Times columnist Judith Warner. “But his report and later statements seem to attest to a greatly outsized sense of vulnerability and victimization.”

Where do they find them, I wonder? Whether Crowley knew about the Jersey City incident, he was alone and responding to a 911 call of a possible crime in progress. There had been recent burglaries in that area. The woman who reported it met him outside. She’d seen two men break in the front door and enter the house.

So, yeah, of course Crowley asked Gates to step outside. He didn’t know who was inside, or what was going on. Fictionalizing, Warner surmises that even a white man might have “bristled at the cold officiousness of the officer’s tone.”

Here’s how Gates described the incident to his own magazine, the Root. Having forced a jammed lock, he was on the phone with Harvard University. “I’m saying, ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’ All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, ‘This is strange.’ So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said, ‘Officer, can I help you?’ And he said, ‘Would you step outside onto the porch.’… All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, ‘No, I will not.’

“My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’”

Three things: Gates needs new lawyers. Second, no he wasn’t in danger, as subsequent events proved. Third, assuming sobriety, why would somebody who’d just broken his door open in broad daylight find it “strange” and “ridiculous” that a cop would ask him to explain?

Mind-reading like many in the (forgive me) liberal media, Gates even supplied Sgt. Crowley with a motive. “It’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.”

Nothing about Crowley’s fine record makes that credible. On CNN, Gates waxed indignant that the officer followed him inside without being asked. It’s called “probable cause.” He’s not going to let a suspect out of his sight until he’s satisfied there’s an innocent explanation. At which point Gates apparently began yelling about racism. He says Crowley refused to identify himself; Crowley says he did, but the professor wouldn’t shut up long enough to hear him.

Was it necessary to arrest Gates? Well, it’s not a crime to act like a jackass, but cops can’t have crowds seeing them cowered by a loudmouth. Everybody with any sense understands about black men and white cops. But racism’s a two-way street. Being a Harvard professor ought to imply a degree of self-control. Had he not acted, yes, so “stupidly,” Gates could have avoided embarrassment.

Meanwhile, President Obama should learn to finesse touchy questions when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to kick off a new GOP flirtation with decency when he announced his vote to confirm Sotomayor last week. (Yet Graham wound up the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to support her, with even supposed judicial moderates like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch voting against her.) Then, after Birther madness reached a new high, a few mid-level GOP names — Mike Huckabee, Michael Steele and even fact-averse propagandists Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly — began distancing themselves from their party’s anti-Obama fringe. “Chairman Steele believes that this is an unnecessary distraction and believes that the president is a U.S. citizen,” a spokeswoman for Steele told the Plum Line’s Greg Sargent. Better late than never.

Still, Limbaugh and Beck continue to ratchet up their alarming and increasingly racist hatred for the president. Both of them have taken to insisting that the first president with a black father and white mother, mostly raised by his white grandparents, is a racist who hates white people. And look for this kind of crazy to escalate with the party base.

Limbaugh’s been on this beat for a long time, but the complicated Gates case inspired him to a whole new level of fiction. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” the radio bully told his audience last Friday, the day Obama expressed regret over his quick judgment in the matter and invited Skip Gates and Officer James Crowley to the White House for a beer. On Monday he insisted, “I do believe [Obama is] an angry black guy!”

Weepy Glenn Beck has been even more hysterical, flatly declaring Obama a “racist” on Fox News and elaborating: “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture.” Watch Beck blather below; listen to his response to the ensuing criticism here.

There’s a psychological term for this kind of unhinged behavior, and it’s called “projection.” These two racists are projecting their own racial feelings onto Obama. Increasingly, the ranks of the racially blinkered (and I include MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan here) are playing victim, insisting Obama’s modest moves — appointing a Latina justice, using the Gates case to speak out against racial profiling — are reversing the racial order wholesale, and putting white men on the bottom of the pile.

One look at Congress, the Supreme Court, Fortune 500 CEOs — or conversely, at prison cells across America — tells you how delusional the Beck-Limbaugh-Buchanan view is, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant. It’s likely to get worse, as persistent economic hardship plus a spike in right-wing racist rhetoric increases the appeal of scapegoat strategies.

It’s time for more decent Republicans to take a stand against the vicious anti-Obama racism of the party fringe and their broadcast fuhrers. On Monday Ohio Sen. George Voinovich blasted the dominance of his party’s Southern fringe, and its outdated Southern Strategy with its emphasis on racial division. Like Voinovich, I think GOP racism and race-baiting will consign the party to a long time in the political minority. But it could claim a lot of other victims along the way.

If you can stand to watch more right-wing crazy, this Media Matters video sums it all up: