I feel the need to comment on two columns that appeared in The Pilot on June 15.

In the first one, Walter Schoen blames Democrats for our current oil crisis because he claims they prevented drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and prevented drilling offshore for the past 40 years.

Strange, since for 24 of the past 40 years, Republican administrations ruled our country -- i.e. Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Where did the prohibition against offshore drilling come from? George H.W. Bush signed an executive order in 1990 that banned it. Who has been the most active opponent of offshore oil drilling? Jeb Bush, Republican governor of Florida. The Florida tourism industry wouldn't stand for it.

Enough of that. In the other column that deserves response, Allan Jefferys says we are afraid to criticize Barack Obama for fear of being called racist.

But we can criticize Barack Obama all we wish without being called racist, merely by attacking his positions, qualifications, education, job skills, intelligence, etc. -- without bringing up the subject of race, which is of no significance at all.

Exactly 10 years ago, when I lived in Texas and urgently needed open-heart surgery, I talked to the El Paso surgeon that had been recommended to me and asked him a lot of questions. How many of those operations had he performed? What about his schooling, his internships?

Choosing a candidate for president is just as important as choosing a doctor. Every voter uses his or her own criteria. Academic excellence should be one criterion. How brilliant is my choice? Can he or she outsmart foreign leaders?

Mr. Jefferys, by contrast, dedicates an entire column to Barack Obama, but he uses Thomas Sowell, a black journalist, to do the hatchet job. I have never met a white racist who didn't love Thomas Sowell, nor have I met a black leader who doesn't hate him.

Let's look at Thomas Sowell. Mr. Sowell denounces affirmative action. He says that blacks should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. He wants the minimum wage lowered.

Sowell says that preferential treatment for blacks in college admission is detrimental to black students because they may not be prepared for the pressure and competition of a university. In 1986, Sowell claimed that black progress was better in the years after World War II and before the civil rights era. He is against school integration.

When the book "The Bell Curve" erupted in controversy in 1995, a book that claimed black IQs were lower than whites because of genetics, i.e., that they were born inferior, Sowell defended the authors.

He states that black schools were doing well before integration and points to the Dumbar school in Washington, D.C., as an example. He also claims that during the 1930s Depression, blacks successfully started small businesses, but that government-sponsored black capital programs resulted in massive business failures for blacks.

Among the many black leaders who detested Sowell were Benjamin Hooks and Carl Rowan. Rowan, a print and television journalist, won a Peabody award and was the only journalist, black or white, to win the Sigma Delta Chi Award for journalistic excellence three years in a row. He was our delegate to the United Nations and the U.S. ambassador to Finland. He best summed up Sowell when he said Sowell gives aid and comfort to American racists. He called him an Aunt Jemima.

If you really want to know what black journalists think about Obama, forget Sowell. The dominant black journalists who are in awe of Obama include Eugene Robinson and Colbert King of The Washington Post, Leonard Pitts of The Miami Herald, Mary Mitchell of The Chicago Sun-Times, Eugene Kane of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Clarence Page of The Chicago Tribune, Les Payne and Katti McCarthy of Newsday, and Cynthia Tucker, editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which endorsed Obama.

What produces a Thomas Sowell? I don't know. Some people just don't get it. I have a feeling that in Germany in the 1930s, there was a club called Jews for Hitler.

Adrian Osborne lives in Pinehurst.