[I'm not a Dowd fan usually, but every dog has her day]
New York Times
February 14, 2001
LIBERTIES
Black and White
By MAUREEN DOWD
W ASHINGTON There is nothing like stealing a presidential election
to put a little wind in a guy's sails.
After 10 years in the shadows, after a mute decade on the bench,
Clarence Thomas had a black-tie coming-out party last night.
The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank here,
honored Justice Thomas with an award as 1,600 guests munched on red
meat at the Washington Hilton.
It was the capital's new power grid: Lynne and Dick Cheney, Karl
Rove, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, Dick Armey and a bevy of
veteran Clinton-bashers. Introducing Justice Thomas, Robert Bork
said that while he thought the majority five-justice opinion in
Bush v. Gore might be debatable, he deemed the "concurrent opinion"
of three justices, including Justice Thomas, to be on "very solid
ground."
The Garbo of the Supreme Court talked. And talked. And talked. And
what Justice Thomas said was pretty bellicose. Rejecting the
president's call for compromise and harmony, he said, "Today there
is much talk about moderation," but there is an "overemphasis on
civility."
"Civility cannot be a governing principle of citizenship or
leadership," he said, adding that "though the war in which we are
engaged is cultural, not civil," one should not let principles be
"cannibalized."
The hourlong speech was so self- pitying and self-aggrandizing that
it evoked comparison to Bill Clinton's defense for pardoning Marc
Rich, when he said that it was easy to say no and took courage to
say yes.
Yesterday was bracketed with celebrations of two men who had
history's most humiliating Senate hearings over tangles with female
subordinates and sex-harassment charges.
One of these Southerners is renowned for talking, one for not
talking. But both nurse bitterness at ideological critics and the
news media, and both crave respect.
As Bill Clinton went to Harlem seeking validation from a mostly
black crowd, Clarence Thomas went to the Hilton seeking validation
from a mostly white crowd.
Many of the whites who crowded around Clarence can't stand Bill.
And many of the blacks who crowded around Bill can't stand
Clarence.
Many blacks regard the sax-playing Elvis of politics, taking the A
train to Harlem to work amid the hair-braiding salons, creole and
soul food restaurants and jazz clubs, as one of their own. "He's
black, he's blue, he's just the best of all time," Chris Rock told
Larry King Monday. They see Bill as a victim of the white G.O.P.
establishment, even as they see Clarence as a pawn of it.
As Ebony magazine recently wrote of Justice Thomas: "Why does it
appear that he consistently votes for issues supported by racists
and archconservatives, and opposed by . . . almost all blacks?"
Bill and Hillary took up the cause of Anita Hill in '92. But W. is
going to make sure that the man his father defended through that
ugliness gets treated warmly. He said during his campaign that
Justices Thomas and Scalia were his favorites.
When John Ashcroft had barely been confirmed as attorney general,
he asked Justice Thomas to hurriedly swear him in. The two were
junior lawyers in the Missouri attorney general's office under John
Danforth, Justice Thomas's Senate sponsor and most loyal defender
during the "high-tech lynching."
W., still smarting from charges that Mr. Ashcroft has been
insensitive on race, plans to appoint a Thomas intimate, Larry
Thompson, as deputy attorney general.
Mr. Thompson, a black conservative pal of Justice Thomas, played a
particularly unsavory role during the Senate hearings as the member
of the Thomas defense team designated to bolster the ludicrous
notion that Ms. Hill may have suffered from a rare mental disorder
known as erotomania the "nutty and slutty" defense.
"Strange Justice," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, reports that,
to rebut Ms. Hill's success taking a polygraph, Senator Alan
Simpson, a Bush buddy, read a statement into the record from Mr.
Thompson, identifying him only as a former U.S. attorney in
Atlanta, not as a member of the Thomas team. The statement asserted
"that if a person suffers from a delusional disorder, he or she may
pass a polygraph test."
As the justice emerges, the former president retreats looking for
yet one more redemption, this time not for the sin of lust but for
the sin of greed. It's showtime at the Apollo.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company