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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
I read the OP article and while the language made me uncomfortable, we are so PC these days that its obvious that this would be seen as 'racist' mostly because it mentioned race from a white perspective, there is a degree of truth to it.
Pan I originally assumed you were just a knee-jerk liberal who would use their powers of cognitive dissidence to ignore anything that even remotely challenged the write/wrongness of their world view. I hope you forgive me for this.
You have shown me you are deeper than that, and have the courage to stand up to those who now view you as a traitor and would rather belittle you for questioning them.
I know you aren't anywhere near a conservative, but its refreshing to see that some people want to discuss whats really going on rather than just defend the guy they like, right or wrong.
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Ustwo, here is one of Pan's "role models", and I assume, one of yours, too. This was "the guy"....the token, selected by politicians as clueless as you and Pan demonstrate yourselves to be....to "fill the shoes" of Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court of the United States:
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http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3682886
Anger Still Fresh in Clarence Thomas' Memoir
Book Review: 'My Grandfather's Son'
By MONICA DOLIN
Oct. 3, 2007 —
Sixteen years have passed since Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court, but his remarkable, awful and bizarre confirmation hearing may still be better known than anything he has said or done since.
Now Justice Thomas has told his own side of that story in an autobiography chronicling his life from his birth in Pinpoint, Ga., until his confirmation battle. It is called "My Grandfather's Son."
Thomas' anger seems as fresh now as it did in 1991 when he called the hearings "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves." None of this is entirely new. What is new is that Thomas has chosen to write about these events now, 16 years later, as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Of Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas of pressuring her to date him while she worked as a lawyer in his office, he writes that she was an outspoken liberal who detested President Reagan, but he hired her anyway when a close friend asked him to "help a sister." He describes her work for him as "mediocre."
In her last year at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission , he says, she stopped coming to morning meetings "as a result of a quarrel with another staff member," she displayed "a rude attitude toward the other members of my staff" and she "seemed far too interested in my social calendar."
In a somewhat pettier vein, he adds that she had "bad breath," that the idea he might have wanted to date her was "laughable," that nobody on his staff liked her and that "the first thing she did [when she went with Thomas to work at the EEOC] was claim the largest office in my suite."
As to the larger question of why he thinks she testified against him, Thomas guesses that she was motivated by "a combination of ego, ambition and immaturity."
Thomas argues that the Hill hearings were nothing more than the last in a long series of efforts to destroy him and torpedo his nomination to the court. Prior to the leak of Hill's statement, he had already swatted down accusations that ranged from wife-beating to drug abuse to draft dodging. When those efforts failed and it looked as though his confirmation was assured, says Thomas, his opponents stooped to relying upon the racist stereotype of the black man who is a sexual predator.
Thomas does not discuss evidence cited elsewhere to support Hill's claims, such as the Judiciary Committee staff's interview with Angela Wright, another EEOC employee who said that Thomas pressured her to date him in a manner similar to what Hill had described. He believes he doesn't need to prove his innocence to anyone.
"My Grandfather's Son" won't convert any of Thomas' enemies into friends, but he really isn't courting them. He frequently refers to northern liberals as "water moccasins" who quietly sneak close and then strike without warning, then he proceeds to poke them with sticks. He recalls thinking about "cynical politicians" who "sucker voters, claiming to care about the poor while actually exploiting them." He says he supported Reagan in 1980 because "I thought that blacks would be better off if they were left alone instead of being used as guinea pigs for the foolish schemes of dream-killing politicians and their ideological acolytes."
When nominated to the court, his "refusal to swallow the liberal pieties that had done so much damage to blacks meant that I had to be destroyed." And perhaps most extraordinary of all:
"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."
Granted, all these statements refer to how he felt in the past but he doesn't ever say he changed his mind, and he still seems pretty angry. Maybe he has a right to be, but as much as one might sympathize, anger is dangerous for a judge, especially when it is directed at politicians who write laws he is called upon to interpret...
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Originally Posted by pan6467
<h3>.....I don't see Clarence Thomas</h3>, Tiger Woods, and many successful black men and women today <h3>living in the past and being hateful, resentful and poisoning</h3> the youths mind. I didn't see or hear of Thurgood Marshall doing it, Hank Aaron, the vast majority of black entertainers.... just those who thrive in impoverished communities that keep their audiences only if they keep the misery and hopelessness alive.
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pan, it must be only because you are not looking hard enough. What you describe is exactly what Clarence Thomas did in his recent book, and Thrugood Marshall passed away, years ago.....
The spectacle of a lying POS like Justice Thomas, still bashing angrily from his high perch, is an offense to all Americans. Ustwo, I see you and Pan offering only incoherence and offense to the thread.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/op...=1&oref=slogin
Op-Ed Contributor
The Smear This Time
By ANITA HILL
Published: October 2, 2007
Waltham, Mass.
....Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.
But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.
In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.
Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.
In 1981, when Mr. Thomas approached me about working for him, I was an associate in good standing at a Washington law firm. In 1991, the partner in charge of associate development informed Mr. Thomas’s mentor, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, that any assertions to the contrary were untrue. Yet, Mr. Thomas insists that I was “asked to leave” the firm.
It’s worth noting, too, that Mr. Thomas hired me not once, but twice while he was in the Reagan administration — first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After two years of working directly for him, I left Washington and returned home to Oklahoma to begin my teaching career.
In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to CBN University (later Regent University) in Virginia Beach, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma. .......
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Last edited by host; 03-26-2008 at 07:22 AM..
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