Congresswoman McKinney & The Admiral

After witnesses related that McKinney was asked to stop three times - and replied with some sort of shove - she went public at a press conference. There she resorted to the now all too familiar fallback positions unavailable to Naughton. Surrounded by celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, McKinney said, "This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female, black congresswoman."

Note how she covered all the bases to preempt a possible indictment, putting the onus on the aggrieved. Plus, in our star-struck culture, we equate celebrity with gravitas. And so we are supposed to believe that an otherwise clueless Calypso singer or action-hero actor lend credence to McKinney's wild charges.

McKinney not only played the race and celebrity cards, but the feminist one as well - as if the dutiful policemen had kept his job this long by allowing unrecognized white male elected officials to enter checkpoints without showing identification.

Victor Davis Hanson