Harry´s Blog

By Herbert Kuhner

If you’re black, brown, red, yellow
or a non-Gentile,
you can’t be a WASP,
but you can be “Whitey,”
otherwise known as “The Man.”
(And of course gender
is no obstacle
to qualify for that appellation.)

All you have to do
is put your own kind
behind you
and join those who formerly
put you in your place.

They need you now.
There are ticklish situations
to be taken care of.
And nobody is as well suited
as those who used to be excluded.
Their enthusiasm is unparalleled.

*************

“I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan;
as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid
of the wrong white people all along.
My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia
but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued
not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots
draped in flowing sanctimony.”
- Clarence Thomas, CBS News Online, Oct. 3, 2007

************

Well, it was liberals, the Democratic Party
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
as well as the help of the heirs of those
fought against equal rights for blacks,
that enabled Thomas to rise to where he is.

***********
Anita Hill: “He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes….On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess….Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, ‘Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?’”

“Opening Statement: Sexual Harassment Hearings Concerning Judge Clarence Thomas,” Women’s Speeches from Around the World. Wikipedia.

After Anita Hill had testified against super-Conservative Supreme Court Justice-to-be Clarence Thomas, the holier-than-thou-crowd hired David Brock to defame Hill
in The Real Anita Hill. However, after publication, Brock got qualms of conscience and spilled the beans.

***********

Excerpt from
Clarence Thomas’s Revenge
By Jane Mayer

The American Prospect © 2001

On its own, (Anita) Hill’s credibility was vulnerable to savage attack. But the math of the situation was clear: One woman plus one more woman amounted to a pattern that would spell the end of the nominee. As (Terry) Wooten put it after the hearings in his laconic, South Carolinian lilt, “Any time you had a second allegation, it was going to be a big problem.”

Instead, Wooten helped to ensure that when another woman did in fact surface with allegations that Thomas had spoken to her in a similarly crude sexual manner the “big problem” became hers, not the nominee’s. That woman was Angela Denise Wright, a hotheaded, outspoken, and fearless newspaper reporter at the time of the hearings, who swore in a statement that she had been subjected to all manner of inappropriate sexual banter from Thomas, including a demand to know her bra cup size, before he fired her from her public-relations job working for him at the EEOC. Unlike Hill, Wright said that Thomas had explicitly tried to date her, and had even shown up uninvited at her house one night.
After the hearings ended with a 52-48 cliff-hanger vote in Thomas’s favor, two senators -Biden and Paul Simon of Illinois–told The Washington Post that they believed that Wright’s testimony would have derailed the nomination, if only she had been heard. Instead of testifying, though, Wright spent the weekend of the hearings holed up with her lawyer in an Arlington, Virginia, motel, waiting in vain to be called by the committee. She had a backup corroborative witness who was ready to testify too: an elderly woman named Rose Jourdain, who had been a speechwriter for Thomas. Despite having been hospitalized that weekend, Jourdain was ready and willing to testify, but she was never called forward, either.
Though he was just a staffer, Wooten played an instrumental part in the still mysterious Wright story. Together with several other staff attorneys, it was his role to depose her over the phone. The transcripts of this deposition show that to Wright’s growing upset, Wooten repeatedly referred to her as having “come forward” to testify against Thomas, when in fact she had been subpoenaed to do so after an office colleague notified the committee of her existence. Wooten also asked pointed questions about Wright’s employment history, putting her on notice that the Republicans planned to bring up piles of dirty laundry they had collected about her various scrapes with earlier bosses.
No amount of reporting has ever fully explained why it was that Wright never got the opportunity to testify against Thomas. But a reasonable case can be made that if either she or the Democrats got cold feet, Wooten is partly to thank for the chill. And thanks to Wright’s silence, Thomas was confirmed.
And of course, thanks to Thomas’s vote in the 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore last fall, the younger President Bush was awarded the White House. And thanks to this victory, it was possible last month for Bush to appoint Wooten, who by then was an assistant U.S. attorney in South Carolina, to the federal bench.
So with friends like these in the capital, Harry, who needs a dog?
Jane Mayer: “Clarence Thomas’s Revenge” The American Prospect, © 2001 by The American Prospect, 7.30.01.