In April Thomas Sowell, a respected conservative scholar, wrote an insidious column undercutting Barack Obama and attacking preemptively the presumptive stupidity and gullibility of an American electorate that would elect him President simply to make a little history. (http://www.townhall.com/col umnists/ThomasSowell/2008/0 4/29/an_old_newness )  

This would not be particularly noteworthy were Sowell not an African American, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a "conservative think tank" located on the campus of Stanford University, one of the nation's leading research universities.  Over the years, Hoover salved the wounds and offered succor to some deeply troubled (and in trouble too) conservatives, among them former House Speaker Newt Gingrich,  and the architect of the U.S. disaster in Iraq, who Germany has indicted for war crimes, the former   Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Like them, Sowell seems to be exceedingly bright: Howard-to-Harvard, A.B.; MA from Columbia, Ph.D. from Chicago, a full three degrees above the G.E.D. he earned in the Marine Corps after quitting high school and fleeing North Carolina at age 17.  Although a self-described "libertarian," like the zealous conservatives who surround him Sowell unhesitatingly massages information to suit his purposes.  His transparently partisan "think pieces" are routinely fraught with half-truths and re-heated reporting. Critics might say that some essays cast him as a bit of an "Uncle Tom," never mind the term itself is often recklessly misapplied and as last week as, Sowell would say, "affirmative action" is.