Sowell Calls The Kettle Black

Which is correct: Barbara Ehrenreich is a liberals, or Barbara Ehrenreich are liberals? I ask because Thomas Sowell seems to think of her in the plural. At least that's what I gather from the title of his 7/14 editorial on Ehrenreich's criticism of Bill Cosby's remarks to the NAACP, "Liberals Shift Focus From Criticism to Critics." The only liberal he cites is Ehrenreich, yet Sowell repeatedly refers to liberals as whole. White liberals anyway. Maybe I should have replaced Sowell's name with "all blacks" or "all conservatives?"

Never mind that he apparently didn't finish reading the column. If he had, he might have been willing to acknowledge that Ehrenreich had at least some cause for criticizing Cosby's remarks. For instance, she writes: 'As for the black youth who so exercise Cosby, their pregnancy rates aren't "soaring," as he reportedly claimed; in fact, they're lower than they've been in decades. Ditto with crime rates.' Maybe this "one silly woman," as Sowell calls her, has a point.

Sowell writes that liberals evade criticism by "shifting the focus to the supposedly bad motivations of the critics." He goes on to say that "people like Barbara Ehrenreich get their jollies by saying clever things to needle American society," that "Blacks have long been used by the left to indict American Society," and that their vision for blacks is more important than the reality since it presents liberals with "opportunities to be clever with words." Here's a clever a word: irony.