Dan Mitchell commenting on Thomas Sowell’s recent syndicated column, The Big Hoax:

If you care about helping the less fortunate succeed, I’m commenting today on a Thomas Sowell column that will make you sad and angry. It is a story about how powerless and disadvantaged people are being hurt to advance the political interests of some elitists.

The first paragraph of a column, article, essay, story or book is important because it determines whether the reader will labor on or go to something else.  Dan Mitchell understands this and Thomas Sowell is the master of the opening paragraph.  The first paragraph of Sowell’s column:

There have been many frauds of historic proportions — for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security.

That made Dan Mitchell want to read on and Thomas Sowell delivers:

The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the “promise” of “equity.”

Sowell wonders why the Obama administration, acting through Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Duncan are playing the race card.  Is it to give “equity” to Black students, or for some other reason?  As always with everything Obama, nothing is as it is presented to be:

What is the purpose or effect of this whole exercise by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice? To help black students or to secure the black vote in an election year by seeming to be coming to the rescue of blacks from white oppression?

Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life.

What they are more fundamentally trying to protect are the black votes which are essential for Democrats. For that, blacks must be constantly depicted as under siege from whites, so that Democrats can be seen as their rescuers.

Promoting paranoia translates into votes. It is a very cynical political game, despite all the lofty rhetoric used to disguise it.

Then Sowell gets to the heart of where Barack Obama’s heart is, and where it isn’t:

Whether the current generation of black students get a decent education is infinitely more important than whether the current generation of Democratic politicians hang on to their jobs.

Read the whole thing, The Big Hoax.  An apt description of the Obama presidency.