Smiling Faces Sometimes

Clarence Thomas has a new book coming out entitled "My Grandfather's Son". He was interviewed by Washington Post, and one of the things he said in this interview inspired me to write this diary. Here is part of what he said:

Racial imagery abounds in "My Grandfather's Son," a continuation of his description of the Senate hearings as a "high-tech lynching."

"As a child in the Deep South, 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," he writes. "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."

Thomas writes that he did not watch Hill's televised testimony against him at his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and so he does not respond in detail to her charges except to call them lies. He describes Hill as "touchy and apt to overreact" and says: "If I or anyone else had done the slightest thing to offend her, she would have complained loudly and instantly, not waited for a decade to make her displeasure known."

He writes that Hill did a "mediocre" job at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he was chairman, and misrepresented herself at the time of the hearings as a "devoutly religious Reagan-administration employee." "In fact, she was a left-winger who'd never expressed any religious sentiments" and had a job in the administration "because I'd given it to her."

Thomas has particularly caustic comments about the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination. He compares then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) to the lying hypocrites in the old song "Smiling Faces Sometimes" by Undisputed Truth. About former senator Howard Metzenbaum (Ohio): "It would be kind to describe him as unlikable."

And Howell Heflin, the late senator from Alabama, was described by the press as "courtly," Thomas says, but his manner "made me think of a slave owner sitting on the porch of a plantation house."

What Clarence Thomas describes in his book is not a new phenomena, but it is important to address it instead of ignore it. An appropriate criticism toward Pres. Bush is that, in the name of NewTone™ , he chose to ignore it instead of address it.

These smiling faced liberal zealots draped in flowing sanctimony have been busy lately pursuing Gen. Petraeus, Marsha Blackburn, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh just to name a few. I admire Clarence Thomas and Rush Limbaugh especially because they do not choose to simply ignore it. More Republican leaders need to follow their example.