To the question he posed here. Taranto:
In the coverage of and commentary about Justice Clarence Thomas’s new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore), a predictable theme has emerged: that Justice Thomas is a “bitter” and “angry” man, who really has no reason to feel that way. After all, as a USA Today editorial sneers, “Are we meant to feel sympathy for the plight of a Yale-educated Supreme Court justice with enormous power, long summer holidays and seven-figure book contracts?”
Perfectly encapsulating this attitude is a letter to the editor that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times (second letter):
If Justice Clarence Thomas had lost his bid in 1991 to be appointed to the Supreme Court as a result of Anita Hill’s testimony about his behavior as her supervisor, it might be understandable that he remembers that testimony with anger and bitterness. However, he was appointed in spite of Professor Hill’s allegations.
It seems that Justice Thomas has spent the last 16 years reliving that testimony and nurturing his wounds, as he reports in his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” Perhaps no one warned the Supreme Court nominee that those hearings would be political and acrimonious.
To Justice Thomas, I say: You received the appointment you sought. You are being “touchy” and overreacting to “slights.” It is time to move on. The country needs you to focus your energy, attention and intelligence on the work of the Supreme Court.
Janet G. Puente
Newtown, Pa., Oct. 2, 2007A point of personal privilege: We know Justice Thomas, having met him in 1993; and the caricature of him as “angry” and “bitter” is wildly at odds with our own experience. We have always found him to be warm, gracious and avuncular. The last time we saw him, at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, he was ebullient, smiling widely and laughing often. When we arrived, he greeted us with a vigorous handshake and a “Hey, buddy!” If he is bitter and angry, he certainly hides it well.
Well, if those are the two categories I’m permitted, I suppose I’m, to coin an expression, as bitter as a black conservative Supreme Court Justice. Bet that makes Ric pucker. Jeff’s the one who’s dumber than a da Vinci.
So, Justice Thomas cannot be bitter about what he experienced because he received the appointment to the Supreme Court; yet Greenwald and the Gluppets can be Outraged! over a word that Dan used to highlight a hypocrisy? One man received a grilling and assault on his character in the national media for months and to this day lives under those allegations and the other received an insult on a blog which would never have been noticed if his Gluppets hadn’t fanned the flames in the comments thread here for three-four days. The first is unimportant and should be ignored – the second is the most awful thing to happen to a well-known blogger who has written a book and had his words read on the floor of the Senate.
Got it – it all makes perfect non-sense; and if dipped in melted cheese would be a particularly tasty mind snack!
Well, in the eyes of the likes of Perfessor Cancer. I’d take that as a compliment. In fact, what primarily attracted me to Protein Wisdom and kept me returning to see what Jeff had going on was the quality and volume of the “progressive” attacks on him.
As Anne Sophie Swetchine wrote, “In order to have an enemy, one must be somebody. One must be a force before he can be resisted by another force. A malicious enemy is better than a clumsy friend.”
Cherish Perfessor Caricature’s hatred, Dan. It looks good on you.
Also, there’s an aphorism which says, The fool hates what is good, and loves what is worthless. So, better the derision of the base man than the acclaim of millions…
That was pretty fun, don’t you think, Mikey? Is there anyglup who you think deserves to move on to the next round?
Thanks, guys. And RiverC, thanks for clearing that up for me. I got the first part of that aphorism in a fortune cookie once, and wasn’t sure how to take it.
Oh, and I can’t help wondering how all those pasty white Senators voting against the poor black man based on their Mandingo stereotype and fear of being anally raped by Justice Thomas can be anything but racist.
Perhaps we could get an teacher of American Political Thought and Comparative Racial Thinking to explain.
He’s also jointly appointed to Women’s Studies, you know. I wonder if he could teach me to tat.
Dan, it was a fun campaign. No, as to the Gluppets – the problem is they were many but, of completely low quality (Glenn’s not running an ISO certified shop, is he?) and so few actually stuck around. Truly, our home-grown models are much better at actually making me work.
I don’t think any were worthy of promotion. Maybe next time they’ll send over their varsity.
I never should have let Brendan talk me into watching 300.
He should be bitter. Affirmative Action denied him the chance to demonstrate his abilities without the onus of ‘assistance’.
He might even pass the Bar.
Representing as he does an ideology that must spin or hide it’s attempts to legalize bigotry, sexism, envy, and even theft, I suppose it’s only natural for Prof Cancer to emphasize appearances.
Surely, must go the reasoning, the man can be neatly summed in what I want to see.
Prof Cancer is a veritable painter, I tell you!
Karen Heller in the Phillie Inquirer Wednesday echoed the same theme of the ANGRY! BITTER! Thomas:
You see, unlike tenured minority academics whose bastions contain no reserve, Justice Thomas should exercise that reserve when he writes an autobiography or just STFU. There’s more idiocy:
Damn uppity negro! After being silent for 16 years he can’t leave well enough alone. Of course, the fact that it was a horrific personal smear on his character must be subsumed to the uncomfortable memory of “not our nation’s finest hour.” STFU! As a result of his plantation hopping (heavens! he calls Anita Hill a leftist!) Thomas gets what he deserves, in Heller’s opinion:
How dare he write about his early life and about the one event in his career that left the most lasting impression (scars?) on him personally. We don’t care about you conservo-negro! Your pain is not our pain because you are not our kind of guy. We need to know more about why you are an idiot, feckless, jihadi-like originalist who hates poor peopleses and wymen! Besides, other justices write way more dignified books than you, uppity:
You know, like being accused of being porn loving pig man in front of the Congress and the American people. Geez, how sensitive!
That’s right, uppity, nice bastion of civility topics not hard opinions about the difficult times in your life. You first have to resign (oh, happy day!) from the court and become tenured at an elite university. Then you can spew all the anger you want. Of course that assumes that your colleagues won’t attempt to have you banned for your jihadi-like originalism. I leave with this set of bon mot:
Beacuse bitter, irrational justices are way worse than those, oh, I don’t know, voted to uphold that bastion of constitutional principles knows as Kelo!
Musn’t ever get uppity with the white, liberal owners of The Narrative™ plantation, uppity!
There’s more but I just can’t lay it out any more. Maybe I’ll move it over to the pub.
Hey Dan… Since Prof. Ric suggests you know about these things.. If you can get an Ann Coulter blow up doll by calling someone a “faggot” and sending two box tops, what does it take to get a Mercedes Colwin doll…? Not the cheap one either.. the one with the vibro attachment and the life-like orfices… No offense but Ann is a little on the skinny side for my taste… A Kirin Chetry doll would have been preferable but she jumped to the Communist News Network….
Someone needs to notify the Supreme Court Historical Society, which currently describes Thomas as “Gregarious, with a hearty laugh…”
Or should the left wait until the history is actually over before they start revising it?
Also, does anybody else notice the hippo sized irony of people like Caric and others sniffing at Thomas “holding a grudge” and “nurturing his wounds” while lecturing on the continued white exploitation and dominance of blacks like it was still 1959?
It’s OK to be bitter and angry as long as it follows the race baiting liberal narrative where progRess in race relations remains “elusive.” !FOREVER!
But… but… if they’re bitter and angry that he was confirmed, how dare he not be bitter and angry too (even though he has no reason to be)?
Taranto goes on to illustrate just how pissed Thomas should have been at this confirmation. Essentially, the US Senate, the FBI and the DC Court of Appeals had their ethics codes violated in order to derail his appointment.
Sorry, from Taranto’s piece.
_______________________
You are under no obligation to believe him or to disbelieve her. But no one has suggested that her charges were substantial enough to hold up in court, even civil court. To be sure, Senate confirmation is a political proceeding, not a judicial one, so that the standard is political: not reasonable doubt or preponderance of the evidence but merely whether enough senators can be induced to switch their vote. This standard is so low as to be almost subterranean, but Hill failed to meet even it. Her testimony changed at least three votes; she would have needed three more.
Even by political standards, Justice Thomas was treated unjustly, for Hill’s charges never should have seen the light of day under the procedures designed to protect nominees from unsubstantiated accusations.
To our mind the most telling detail about Hill in Thomas’s book is something he mentions only in passing, on page 242: that when she approached the Judiciary Committee with her accusations, “she initially requested that her name be withheld from the members.” Anonymous character assassination was too low a tactic even for Joe Biden, who said no.
Hill gave a confidential statement to the FBI, which conducted an investigation and presented the results to the committee. The charges became public not because senators, after due deliberation, decided they were worth airing, but because some rogue senator or staffer decided to leak them to reporters.
Just days before–and we’d completely forgotten about this, as it was overshadowed by the Hill circus–someone at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where Thomas then served, leaked a copy of a draft opinion Thomas had written. As he explains on page 246:
This breach of confidentiality was unprecedented. One of the hallmarks of the federal judiciary had always been the absolute secrecy in which it worked. Leaks were unthinkable–until now. The case in question involved preferences given to women by the Federal Communications Commission in awarding radio-station licenses, and it was clear that my opinion had been leaked by a person or persons who wanted to portray me as unsympathetic to women’s causes.
With this pair of leaks, Thomas’s political foes managed to violate the integrity of the FBI, the Senate and the D.C. Circuit–that is, of all three branches of government. This behavior was unethical, unconscionable and possibly criminal, and no one has ever been held to account for it.
The Thomas hearings were the crystalization, in my mind, of the fear of lying Stalinists with no regard for the Constitution.
These leftists envision the USSR when they hear the words: “The United States Of America”. Only this time, THEY will get it right (unlike every single other experiment in Communism) because THEY are so much smarter than any human who ever walked the Earth – especially the brainless crud that inhabits the United States.
Matt Franck’s take over at NRO’s “Bench Memos“:
Savagely beating back all rival claimants for the title of World’s Silliest Newspaper, the New York Times editorializes today that Justice Clarence Thomas’s memoir My Grandfather’s Son is so suffused with anger (but see Mona Charen for the rest of the story) that Justice Thomas should . . . wait for it . . . recuse himself in all cases involving the interests of those who opposed his nomination!
So. If political forces, fearing a judge will be seated who will not agree with their arguments on legal issues, gin up a phony scandal to destroy a nominee’s reputation, and the nominee survives the assault and wins through to a seat on the bench, but remains peevish with those who sought to destroy him, he is thereafter forbidden by judicial ethics to sit in judgment on the persuasiveness of those legal arguments that they feared he would reject. Neat trick: heads they win, tails he loses.
BJ – They are impervious to irony, and facts.
The man had to deal with an unsubstantiated slur on his reputation, but is supposed to just let it go? Ok then. Did they remember to call him unqualified and unintelligent also? I wonder what it’s like to live in a world unsullied by things like facts? What color do you suppose the sky is there?
– “Then again, he asked for it. Son doesn’t include a solitary mention of his work on the Supreme Court, ending as it does with his investiture, after devoting nearly a third of the 289-page memoir to the ugly confirmation process.”
– The first sentence = Uppity house Negro redux. The rest of this sour grapes trash job = “Yes, yes we know how embarassing it must be to have to relive that “high tech lynching by the party of caring”, all over again. Did someone mention bitterness?
buzz:
I’d have to go with Red, including the stars…
– Watching whats been going on with the Left for the past 7 years harkens me back to Lava Lamps, bell bottoms, and Rainbow Push dayglow colors. All we need is a few Mayor Daley riotous news xonferences, acting as the Beat generations nemesis, and the daydream (or nightmare as you prefer) would be complete. I can almost hear Sonny and Sher grinding through an endless chorus of I got you babe, or Peter. Paul, and Mary crooning for that illusive hammer.
At least they didn’t call him articulate.
– cut and paste “elusive” at will…..
Here’s some more puffed up/blimp sized irony from Karen Heller of the Philly Inquirer (emphasis mine):
The above is such bone jarring stupidity as to compel me to chug a gallon of whole milk lest I suffer from osteoporosis. Let’s clue Heller in on the idea that all, every, the total amount of SCOTUS nominations have at least some element of politics, some more than others. It’s not enough to slander the uppity negro by calling him irrational, Heller needs us to understand that his nomination was everything to do with politics and, as a result nothing to do with his achievements, intellect, or experience.
It just astonishes me that she can make that kind of utterly biased statement (by implication) and not have any insight into her own bigotry. but, hey, he left the plantation, in fact tried to burn it down and hurt the owners so screw him. Dress this up with a grainy video of Big Head puppets and chanting long hairs and you’d have the liberal equivalent of a Fatwa.
Un. Freakin’. Believable.
And if I had another penis,
I’d slap you in the morning,
I’d whack you in the evening,
All over this blog.
I’d slap out danger,
I’d smack out warning . . .
(apologies to both P,P & M and Rushes songwriter)
Clarence, the upp’ty negro, sits on the court.
In 16 years he’d never talked of when he had been Borked!
But Harper’s came a callin’, and handed him a check.
Now Clarence has his sweet revenge upon those dames and gents!
Biden took a wallop but he saved is bitterest pill,
to force into the yawning gap of poor Anita Hill!
“Leftist” he proclaimed, a lier and a slut.
He couldn’t wait to say “She’s great” and toss her boney butt!
Oh, Clarence the upp’ty negro, sits on the court.
It’s politics that got him there and skin tone of a sort!
Clarence is originalist, no living does he see.
Those liberals hate him cause he’s not — black authentically!
Great stuff, BJ.
Heh! I’ll bring the guitar and sing it at the PW reunion.
Rut Roh…..you know BJ….I was thinking of attending up until that threat…..Heh
– I still marval to this day that they were able to get hill to go along with the farce. Probably she had a wire coat hanger up her derrier that she wasn’t going with him to the Capital. A sort of “no Hill for Hill” kind of bitterness. Either that or the offer must have been good. What has she been doing in the interveining years? That might hold a clue, and how fast would the rabid ideologs on the Left turn on her too if she ever decides to come clean.
BB-P: You wound me! Oh, sallow critic thy name is Legion!!!
heh
Hill teaches Law and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University in Mass., an extremely liberal school. I’m just reminded that her autobiography printed in 1998 was titled … wait for it …
Speaking Truth to Power
Reality is stranger than fiction!
BTW: I will never, ever forget the sour, squirm-like-a-worm demeanor of all of the Senators on that committee when Thomas looked them in the eye and proclaimed, “This is a high tech lynching.” One of the most compelling and satisfying moments from a committee hearing evah!
The only–ONLY–good thing to come of the pathetic spectacle of that hearing was SNL’s parody skit where the good Senators discuss the various types of porn. Chris Farley was pricless. Anyone remember which Senator he was supposed to be?
– SNL Weekend update – with Chevy Chase-
Chevy: Good evening and welcome to weekend update….Hi, I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not….tonight we have a special report on the recent events surrounding the Brandeis events by Ms Emily Litella…”
Chevy: “…So tell me Ms. Litella….what did you think of this situation at the University?
Emily:“…What do I think, well I’ll tell you what I think…..Just what do those hoolligan students think they’re doing anyway, running around throwing brandy in peoples eyes….I mean goodness gracious don’t we have enough trouble with people getting hot coffee spilled in their laps at fast food places….I just don’t understand whats gotten into todays young people. Why in my day if we even thought about……?….what?”
Chevy:“pppsssssst…no…. thats Brandeis University….Brandeis… not Brandy eyes…..Brandeis…..”
Emily:“…..Oh….”
Emily:“….Oh well then, thats different…..Nevermind”
100% pure distilled passive-aggressive bullshit.
Gee, they tried to destroy this person, falsely accused him of perversion, lied about him in public, and generally comported themselves like the prosecutors at Stalinist show trials. But if he says anything even so much as harsh in response, HE’S the problem child.
No, motherfuckers. You do NOT get to play that game, not while I’m in the damned room. The attack was made on him, I give a fuck if he shoots back, Hell, I encourage it. If Thomas always referred to Kennedy as “that fat racist fuck” in public, I’d consider it one small part of what Kennedy deserved.
So when a leftist takes aim at Thomas for being “bitter” while minimizing the vicious attacks made on him by their ideological compatriots, it’s just another case of 200 proof hypocrisy.
On the other hand, to admit the source of the problem was a leftist smear would be a risk to the “right wing smear machine” meme, another essential delusion.
It’s hard not to take issue with Bill Whittle’s assertion that leftists are just good, decent, kind people with a severe reality disorder. I mean, how does the “Thomas Scenario” not lead to a conclusion of malum in se?
I think that sums it up rather well, Merovign.
Anita Hill returned to teaching in Oklahoma at Liberty University (sorry, she’s no lefty). She has since left the gentle arms of Oral Roberts and teaches at Brandeis. She has remained mum on the subject since 1991, until she wrote a letter this week to the NY Times.
“how does the “Thomas Scenario†not lead to a conclusion of malum in se?”
>chuckle>
Me transmitte sursum, caledoni! –
Because or course Moral Oral personally vets the morals and politics of everyone who is hired to teach at his school, rather than, you know, delegating to department heads and faculty boards like they do at every other institution of higher learning on the face of the earth.
forwhatit’sworth:
Not to pick nits but she published a self aggrandising auto biography in 1993 which continued to rip Thomas and paint herself as the the noble, unbowed victim, well, Speaking Truth to Power!
Was her silence over the years an assumption that all had been said or a reflection of lack of interest? For what it’s worth.
Maybe ol’ Dan should start reading my posts before responding. My argument was that Thomas was a bitter, broken man years before he was nominated to the court. Was that because he was an “inauthentic” black person as all the pw gang members who didn’t read the post also claim that I said?
Not really.
My argument, based on Thomas’ ABC interview, was that Thomas was bitter and resentful because of the pain he experienced over being the “first black” this and the “first black” that. Thomas blamed his pain on the “Grand Theorists” of the civil rights movement who I take to be MLK, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Abernethy, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights leaders. In my opinion, it was this suspiciousness about the civil rights leadership that created the common ground between Thomas and white conservatives that started him down the long path to his current position.
Or it just could have been the bitterness. Isn’t a bitter sense of superiority pretty much the mother’s milk of the right?
Holy Necro-Post, Dr. Ric! Your taking this historian bit a little far, don’t you think?
What evidence do you support that argument with? What leads you to believe that he’s either bitter or broken?
Well just look where he wound up, Pablo! A broken man who sank all the way to the top of his profession.
It is obvious.
If you are a complete idiot.
Hi, my sites: :
MUSIC DOWNLOADS = free limewire = music downloads
http://idisk.mac.com/fmp3musicdownloads/Public/index.html MUSIC DOWNLOADS :: http://www.empireunion.org/limewire.htm free limewire :: http://www.fixgrout.com/cgi/musicpage35.html music
[url=http://idisk.mac.com/fmp3musicdownloads/Public/index.html]free music download[/url] .. [url=http://www.empireunion.org/limewire.htm]limewire[/url] .. [url=http://www.fixgrout.com/cgi/musicpage35.html]free mp3 downloads[/url]0f8f40fbf6c3cdd2aa7e52afa9d91923