When President "Obama denounced the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department for stupidity--
one of the department's officers, Sergeant James Crowley, while investigating a possible break-in, arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for disorderly conduct for being belligerent, refusing to show identification and cooperate with the police, and after repeatedly accusing the Sergeant of racism (the sergeant is white, the Professor is black)--
he made the following logical errors:
1. When the President acknowledged he made his comments without having all the evidence, he acting irrationally by basing his comments on subjective feelings rather than objective facts;
2. When the President admitted he was biased in his judgment of the incident because the Professor was a friend, he sought to include bias as an element of fairness and justitce;
3. When the President impliedly brought the issue of racism into the arrest, he made the syncretic error of relating two facts (there is racism in America, and there was this incident) that were not proven to be related to each other;
4. When the President implied that racism motivated the Sergeant's actions, he assumed a cause and effect relationship that didn't necessarily exist;
5. When the President invoked the spectre of racism, based solely on the fact that some police officers may be racist, he committed the error of generalization (what's true of some members of a group is true for all members of the group)...ironically, the logical error inherent in racism;
6. When the President denigrated the police for arresting "a middle-aged man with a cane," he sought to evoke sympathy by bringing up irrelevancies, and either showed historical ignorance or was guilty of attempted deception.
For all of the above reasons, President Obama is awarded the first ZIT Award for being guilty of the most Zany Illogical Thinking of the week.
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