Questions for the new Democrat front runner

The Washington Post administers a corrective to Barack Obama's irresponsible rhetoric.

WHAT HE GOT WRONG: "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college."

Obama has repeated this false claim to predominantly African American audiences, even after The Washington Post pointed out the mistake to his campaign. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African American men ages 18 to 24 were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005. An additional 87,000 were temporarily held in local jails in mid-2006. According to 2005 census data, 530,000 African American men in this age group were in college.

Black male college students outnumber black male prisoners even if the age group is expanded to 30 or 35. The Obama campaign has not responded to several requests for statistical data to support the senator's remarks, and it has not explained a similar claim that he made to an NAACP audience on July 12.

Every politician makes statements which stretch the truth in political campaigns. They use hyperbole and say things that can only look accurate when viewed at exactly the right angle. This is mostly harmless because experience has taught adults to take the words of a politician trying to get elected with more than a few grains of salt, and the media and their opponents will be only too happy to point out their mistakes. Usually.

However what Obama is doing is wrong and dangerous because he is knowingly feeding one of the destructive myths which infect the black community breeding resentment and preventing too many blacks from fully assimilating into the greater culture and reaping all its benefits.

Most blacks believe that there are more black men in prison than in college because they believe that white America wants it that way. The high black incarceration rate is seen as a part of a deliberate policy to keep black people down. They are encouraged in this belief by demagogic "leaders" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who help keep their people ignorant and dependant (and voting Democrat) in exchange for a measure of personal power and wealth (you would think that these men who call themselves "reverend" would be afraid that there might actually be a God).

For an educated and successful black politician like Barack Obama, who appears to be headed for his party's presidential nomination, to lend his considerable credibility to the spreading of this corrosive lie increases its power to harm race relations by an order of magnitude.

If Barack Obama is elected president is this how he intends to govern, as a racial demagogue? We know that he belongs to a black separatist, if not supremacist, church which is led by a deeply racist pastor. Obama has spoken of how much this church and pastor have meant to him. How deeply does Mr. Obama buy into this theology of racial paranoia and grievance? These are questions he needs to answer.

How many young black men have been discouraged from even trying to obtain the education which could lift them out of poverty and despair and instead thrown away their lives in crime and drugs because they had been led to believe that no matter how hard they worked the white man wouldn't let them achieve success honestly?

If it is fair to ask Mike Huckabee if he believes every word of the Bible and Mitt Romney if he believes that Jesus and Lucifer are brothers then it ought to be fair to ask Barack Obama if he believes that spreading poisonous lies about race is acceptable just because he wants to be president.