Maureen Dowd has a dreadful column in yesterday’s New York Times on the Lott issue. What made it "dreadful" was the last line. After pointing out the racial mistakes of the would-be Majority Leader’s career, she compared him to Clarence Thomas, who offered a passionate denunciation of the cross burning last week. Dowd concluded: "You know you’re in trouble when Clarence Thomas is playing Martin Luther King to your David Duke."

Let’s analyze this for a moment. Why would she say this? Anyone who actually follows the Court, rather than someone who simply accepts the liberal spin about Thomas without thinking for herself, knows that he is quite impassioned about these issues. Indeed, the last time there was a Klan speech case before the Court involving the placement by the Klan of a cross on the Columbus Capitol grounds, he offered not only his thoughts during oral arguments but a separate opinion to clarify that a cross is not a religious symbol to the Klan, but one with deep overtones of racism and threat.

One quickly turns to the affirmative action cases as the cause for Dowd’s comments. It seems that Dowd falls in with the camp which finds that you are not truly "Black" unless you embrace affirmative action. To do otherwise makes you an "Uncle Tom,"--and who better to make such implicit assertions than an elite White journalist at the New York Times? There are some racists who seek to place chains on men’s legs, and to physically separate them based on their color, and there are other racists who would shackle men’s minds, and who seek not physical separation, but separation based on racially "appropriate" thought. Both are pernicious, and it appears that Dowd subscribes to the latter theory.