James Crowley, Skip Gates, Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat down for a beer at the White House.

(Sounds like a joke involving an airplane and parachutes, doesn’t it?)

Reading between the lines, sounds like not much happened to change anyone’s mind.

“Two gentlemen agreed to disagree,” Crowley told reporters at AFL-CIO headquarters. “This was a positive step in moving forward.”

On the other hand, they may get together again.

Charles Ogletree, Gates’s friend and attorney, said, “They’ll be getting together to break some bread in a private session and talk about some community outreach efforts to improve relations between police and communities,” said Ogletree, who will be issuing a statement on behalf of Gates later this evening on how the nation should move forward.

(Why is it, by the way, that one of the most eloquent men in America chooses to let his lawyer speak for him? Is it on the advice of counsel? Is it because he’s afraid of what he’ll say if he does talk? Or is it just a PR move—”Skip, you’re getting pounded, stop giving interviews”….)

Anyway, it would have been unlikely that the two men in this drama would have suddenly said, “Oh, gosh, you’re right!” The meeting itself matters.

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* I just had one, a Viking, at a club in Reykavik. Earlier today, I had a shot of Brennivin, colloquially known here as “Black Death.”

In between those things…clean living. I swear.