Bob Somerby has caught another pundit exercising his psychic powers in the Henry Louis Gates affair. Following in Judith Warner’s footsteps, the Washington Post’s columnist Eugene Robinson has published a column in which he purports to read Crowley’s mind (my emphasis):

[F]or the sake of argument, let’s assume that Crowley’s version of the incident is true — that Gates, from the outset, was accusatory, aggressive and even obnoxious, addressing the officer with an air of highhanded superiority. Let’s assume he really recited the Big Cheese mantra: “You have no idea who you’re messing with.”

I lived in Cambridge for a year, and I can attest that meeting a famous Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a famous basketball player who happens to be tall. It’s not exactly a surprise. Crowley wouldn’t have lasted a week on the force, much less made sergeant, if he had tried to arrest every member of the Harvard community who treated him as if he belonged to an inferior species. Yet instead of walking away, Crowley arrested Gates as he stepped onto the front porch of his own house.

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved — uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop — that Crowley couldn’t abide.

As Somerby points out, Robinson uses the weasel word “[a]pparently” to justify his projection of thoughts into Crowley’s head, then uses the word “uppity” to insinuate that the police officer’s actions were racially motivated. Unfortunately, he can’t possibly know any of this to be true. It’s a journalistic act as inexcusable as George Will’s distortions of climate data, but one that’s likely to draw far less attention.