As news about Professor Gates’ confrontation with the Cambridge Police Department was breaking — or was it shortly after the President spoke so forcefully about it? — a friend turned to me and said: “Do not blog about this.”

That may be some version of what Michelle Obama was thinking as she saw her husband embark on what I thought was a humorous, candid and incisive commentary on the events surrounding a wealthy Harvard professor, his friend, being schooled by the police. (As an aside: if Obama were a blogger, he would have known not to use any derivative of the word “stupid.” Feminist bloggers know the content of what they are trying to say dissolves as (male) conservatives leap to censure them for disparaging such noble whitemale institutions as American policing or the Varsity Sport That Must Never Be Mentioned.) If there had been a thought bubble over Michelle’s head, it…

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