Beer-talks: Colbert's 'teachable moment'

by Mark Silva

"I am still reeling over last week's profiling scandal,'' comedian Stephen Colbert says. "I am speaking, of course, of Barack Obama's profiling of Cambridge police officer James Crowley.''

Colbert, anchor of Comedy Central's Colbert Report, has had some fun with the "post-racial beerfest'' that the president is hosting this evening at the White House with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge's Sgt. James Crowley.

"My hope is... this ends up being a teachable moment,'' Obama said last week at the White House, in announcing that he had spoken with the police sergeant, who, it turned out, had suggested this idea of getting together for a beer. Gates, a noted African-American scholar arrested in his own home after forcing his way in, also has said, in accepting the invitation to a beer, that this could be a teachable moment.

Colbert's conclusion: "Obama is teaching that, if you arrest a black man under questionable circumstances, you get to have a beer with the president.''