After a week, the turbid tale of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police has finally settled into the tedium of the 24-hour news cycle, singularly focused – but predictably superficial – in its debate over whether race played a prevailing role in Gates’ doorstep arrest on July 16.

That happens when a black, liberal scholar charges the white police officer who arrested him with racial profiling, and when the president, who happens to be black, says the police acted "stupidly" for doing so. The debate has thus found its shopworn but comfortable partisan trajectory, with Democrats using Gates to reopen a "dialogue" on race relations that forever churns but goes nowhere, and Republicans, largely represented by the right-wing blogosphere, loyally falling in behind the cops, holding the Thin Blue Line on the political front.

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