As we know, Fox News’ main contribution to boosting conservatism’s appeal to African-Americans consists of making martyrs out of black conservatives because of the hostile treatment they get for going against "stereotype". So when someone at Fox unearthed remarks made last month by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about Obama being President because he’d said the things the “elites and the media” wanted to hear, they made haste to make that the lead post on yesterday's Fox Nation.

The remarks were from an interview, conducted on April 9 at Duquesne University Law School in Pittsburgh, and recorded on C-Span. The interview is an hour long and spans a lot of subjects: Thomas’ childhood in coastal Georgia, his education, his fighting spirit, and who he’s friends with on the Supreme Court. In the first part of the interview, he’s not exactly a fountain of wit and charm, though he’s reasonably genial and even humorous now and then. But when asked if he’d expected to see an African-American president during his lifetime, his response was surprisingly graceless and unpleasant: he immediately began venting about how Obama’s success was due to having been approved by the elites and the media. “And that will happen with virtually -- you pick your person, any black person who says something that is not the prescribed things that they expect from a black person will be picked apart. You can pick anybody, don’t pick me, pick anyone who has decided not to go along with it; there’s a price to pay. So, I always assumed it would be somebody the media had to agree with.” (Really? You managed to get onto the Supreme Court without saying the prescribed-things-that-they-expect-from-a-black-person, didn’t you, Mr. Justice?)

Some people on Fox Nation, of course, bought that whine-line wholesale:

Oh and that reminds me, gentle reader: where is Ben Carson? He was on Fox practically every day for a month or so, with Sean Hannity fawning all over him and touting him as the next President? Since his remarks referring to same-sex marriage in the same breath as bestiality and pedophilia, Carson is still making still making the talk circuit, but his last appearance on Fox, that I can find, was on April 9.

Whatever the reasons for his abrupt disappearance, the good doctor is probably better off without the likes of Fox News licking his boots. And I bet he feels freer in promoting the parts of his philosophy that wouldn’t appeal to Fox audiences - like calling for state funding of public schools, to help level the playing field for disadvantaged kids.