Livin’ La Vida Loca

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

Sometimes the people we write about drive us crazy.

During the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, I used to wake up in the middle of the night, trying to separate truth from lies.

The same thing happened during the imbroglio between Sgt. James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the days before the beer summit — (“Beer makes me bloat,” Gates told me) — I woke up in the middle of the night, puzzling over how the policeman and the professor could have such irreconcilable stories.

The Cambridge officer wrote in his report that Gates had yelled at him, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” The Harvard professor denied it.

(More here.)