It’s amazing that the black vote continues to lean so heavily in favor of a party that takes them for granted and thinks so little of them.

Take, for example, John Edwards’ useless pandering comments last week:

The idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.”

The message is clear: Vote for Democrats because you’re just not capable of staying out or prison or alive without our help.

And even Barack Obama played the game in July when he said:

“We have more work to do when more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America.”

Aside from the blatant racist undertones of the comments, the even more outrageous fact is that they’re complete lies.

Are there really more black men in prison than college? Of course not.

According to 2005 Census Bureau statistics, the male African-American population of the United States aged between 18 and 24 numbered 1,896,000. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African-Americans in this age group were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005. See table 10 of this report. If you add the numbers in local jail (measured in mid-2006), you arrive at a grand total of 193,000 incarcerated young Black males, or slightly over 10 percent.

According to the same census data, 530,000 of these African-American males, or twenty eight percent, were enrolled in colleges or universities (including two-year-colleges) in 2005. That is five times the number of young black men in federal and state prisons and two and a half times the total number incarcerated. If you expanded the age group to include African-American males up to thirty or thirty five, the college attendees would still outnumber the prisoners.

But these guys have (D) beside their name, so they’re immune from the race-peddling, outrage caucus.