Dinesh D'Souza has already commented on Hillary Clinton's statement that the Supreme Court's decision on race-based school assignments "turned the clock back on history." However, her remark fails to make sense at so many levels that it's worth further comment.

Presumably, Clinton meant that the Court had turned back the clock to the time when public school systems engaged in racial segregation. But these cases weren't about racial segregation. To give just one example from the record, the Seattle school board took race into account in assigning students to Franklin High School, which is located in a "non-white" part of the city. As a result of these efforts, the student body at Franklin was 40 percent white; 30 percent Asian American; 22 percent African American; and 8 percent Latino. Without the race-based assignments, the student body would have been 21 percent white; 40 percent Asian-American; 31 percent African-American; and 8 percent Latino. My recollection of the late 1950s may be hazy, but I'm pretty sure that moving from the former outcome to the latter won't bring us back to those days.

Maybe Clinton meant that the Court's decision will cause school boards to kick all the whites out of Franklin and re-impose segregation. But such a concern would be unfounded. The Seattle school district had voluntarily decided to use race-based assignments to promote greater racial diversity. If it had wanted to limit white enrollment at Franklin, it wouldn't voluntarily have used race-based assignments to boost white enrollment there from 21 percent to 40 percent. The same bureaucrats who did this (hoping, the record shows, to more closely mirror white representation in the school district as as whole) are not suddenly going to decide to segregate the school. They will simply stop taking race into account, which is the way things are supposed to be done under the Constitution. As Chief Justice Roberts put it, "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Finally, if some school district somewhere decides to revert to the bad old days, the Supreme Court's decision will give them no cover. All nine Justices agree (and it's been the law for more than 50 years) that race-based assignments cannot be used to promote segregated schools or to otherwise discriminate against minorities. In fact, all nine go further and agree that race-based assignments can legitimately be used to remedy the effects of past intentional discrimination. In this case, though, there was no evidence that Seattle had ever engaged in such discrimination.

It's unlikely that Hillary Clinton bothered to read the Supreme Court's lengthy opinion before commenting on it. She had a candidates' debate at historically black Howard University, and needed a sound-bite. Politicians do this all the time, and Clinton's failure to read the opinion certainly isn't as bad as her failure to read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting in favor of the war in Iraq.

On the other hand, Hillary's brand of alarmism has a downside beyond it's sheer dishonesty. Comparing things to segregation that don't resemble segregation trivializes the evil of that phenomenon, and decreases the likelihood that people will become aroused in the event of a genuine incident of it.