As I watched “Confirmation,” the HBO film on the 1991 Senate hearings over whether Clarence Thomas should be named an associate justice on the Supreme Court in the wake of Law Professor Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment, I was reminded once again how Professor Hill both volunteered to take and passed a lie detector test and how two things came to pass, neither of which surprised me: one, Clarence Thomas would not take a lie detector test and two, denials aside, he never once said words to the effect of: “Anyone conducting himself in the manner of which I have been accused is not fit to serve on the Supreme Court let alone be chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”
As a bonus, it was especially delicious to see a man who in years since has criticized affirmative action and joined the court majority in essentially saying that racism no longer exists having the gumption to play the race card when it served his purposes, i.e. stating that the hearings were nothing more than a “high tech lynching,” proclaiming this with the full knowledge that his accuser, like himself, was black. Nicely played, sir. Nicely played.
BILL
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