Here's how you answer when someone says, vote for Obama so we can be healed: I heard black moderate John McWhorter yesterday say on the Laura Ingraham radio show that he plans to vote for Obama for president because of the tremendously positive psychological effect that it will have on blacks. Hope will be felt like never before, and race hustlers like nut surgeon Jesse Jackson won't be taken seriously anymore.

Mr. McWhorter, in all his racial excitement, must have neglected to read yesterday's New York Times poll:

The results of the poll... suggested that Mr. Obama’s candidacy, while generating high levels of enthusiasm among black voters, is not seen by them as evidence of significant improvement in race relations.

For the first time ever, the person who is one step away from the most powerful position in the world is black, but still blacks folks don't think things are getting better?!

And that last step--his winning the Presidency--is supposed to return us to the racial Garden of Eden?

Call me cold, but I have a very different take on what will bring an end to the era of accusation. My prediction is that the Jesse's and the Al's and all the black finger-pointing will stop only when it don't pay no mo'. Why waste your breath when the Man just always laughs and gives you the finger?

I learned the term "extinction" in Psych 101. If you want to stop the bird from pecking, stop giving him the frickin' pellet.