Leave it to bitter, barren spinster Maureen Dowd at the New York Times to unwittingly provide the perfect illustration of the harm that racial preferences do to African-Americans. And all this while trying to demonstrate the opposite.

In (yet another) bilious screed, the notorious booze-hound Ms. Dowd comes absolutely unglued at Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the University of Michigan case. And in doing so, she perfectly demonstrates why all African-Americans should, with Thomas, be vehemently opposed to such programs.

In yesterday’s ranting, the bourbon-breathed harpy says of Thomas’ dissenting opinion: “It's poignant, really. It makes him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race...”

Read that quote again. In plain black and white (no pun intended), Maureen Dowd says that Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court because of his race.

I’ll leave it to James Taranto at Opinion Journal’s always-excellent “Best of the Web Today” to explain the incredible irony of Old Maid Dowd’s idiotic piece, which, remember, was written in support of so-called affirmative action programs:

Dowd pretends as if there's no substance to Thomas's argument--she labels his dissent a "therapeutic outburst"--yet she unwittingly illustrates the truth of one of his arguments, namely that racial preferences stigmatize blacks, whether or not they relied on them for advancement. As Thomas puts it:

When blacks take positions in the highest places of government, industry, or academia, it is an open question today whether their skin color played a part in their advancement. The question itself is the stigma--because either racial discrimination did play a role, in which case the person may be deemed "otherwise unqualified," or it did not, in which case asking the question itself unfairly marks those blacks who would succeed without discrimination.

Clarence Thomas graduated from Yale Law School in 1974. Twenty-nine years later, after a distinguished career as a public servant, he is ridiculed in the pages of one of America's more influential newspapers by a colleague who presumes that he was unqualified to gain admission on the merits.

You couldn't have paid the bleary-eyed Ms. Dowd to more perfectly illustrate the harm that racial preferences do to African-Americans. No matter what an African-American achieves in life, under racial preferences those achievements will be clouded in doubt.

Ms. Dowd and those like her will always see such achievements as merely the result of their own benevolent, loosened standards rather than the result of actual merit. She and her patronizing ilk will be waiting in the wings to remind any black who gets a little too uppity that his achievements are really only the result of their own magnanimous charity. She desperately wants to say to them "You got where you are because I lowered the bar, not because of anything you earned on your own. My condescension put you here. And don't you ever forget it."

So will there be any demonstrations outside the New York Times to protest the blatant bigotry of Maureen Dowd?