What Went Down at the Beer Summit?

Elizabeth Gates shares her experience at the White House, "What I Saw at the Beer Summit" (via Memeorandum):

In a world in which the conversation on race has traditionally taken a back seat to both logic and reason, it’s no wonder that yesterday’s so-called “Beer Summit” at the White House seemed to make little sense at all. It wasn’t because the President was wrong in offering up a few cold ones to my father, Henry Louis Gates, and the now infamous Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to tame the media blitz around my father’s arrest—it was because like most issues that make their way to TMZ, the reference point had shifted. The debate over Red Stripe and Blue Moon had somehow overshadowed the fact that this story began with a black Harvard professor and a white cop from Natick, Mass—and as CNN’s countdown clock to the event taunted viewers like a time bomb, it was clear that this day wasn’t going to be the beginning of a serious discussion on human relations but rather a circus-like ending of a misunderstanding between a couple of very decent men.

I can’t say that I was shocked.

As our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sergeant Crowley’s lovely 14-year old daughter—who was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes—we were instantly transported from the post-racial myth of America in 2008 to the reality of 2009. There they stood, a pleasant family of five, listening patiently to the overzealous tour guide boast about the fully functioning fireplace to the left of the doorframe.

Read the whole thing, here. Also, The Astute Bloggers, "Like Father Like Daughter: Ridiculous, Illogical and Typically Liberal Non-Sequitur From Elizabeth Gates."

Related: "White House 'Beer Summit' Becomes Something of a Brouhaha."

But don't miss Jim Treacher's take, in sequential photos (humor alert!), "Oh, to be a fly on a beer mug ..."