Fatal Facts Setting history straight

All that many people know about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are the accusations against him by Anita Hill during his confirmation hearings in 1991.

However, such subsequent events as the “rape” accusations against Duke University students last year and, before that, a similar hoax in the Tawana Brawley case, have belatedly demonstrated how mindless it is to automatically accept accusations, as many in the media did with Anita Hill.

Now, with the recent publication of Justice Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, Anita Hill has surfaced again in the media to repeat her accusations.

The time is long overdue to take a hard look at hard facts, so that we can put those accusations in the garbage can, where they belong.

The first of these hard facts is that, contrary to what has been repeated so often in the media, it was not just a question of what “he said” versus what “she said.”

A whole phalanx of female witnesses who had worked with both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill came out in support of him at his confirmation hearings.

One of those witnesses went out of her way to point out that the image that Anita Hill projected on television bore no resemblance to the behavior and attitudes of either Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas that she had seen with her own eyes.

On the other side, one witness backed up Anita Hill’s story by saying that she had been told the same things by Anita Hill when they both lived in Washington.

But then the fact came out that this star witness had left Washington before Anita Hill went to work for Clarence Thomas, so there was no way that her corroboration could be true.

There were ways in which different versions of events by Hill and Thomas were quite capable of being checked — but were not checked.

That failure to check the facts was very strange in a situation where so much depended on the credibility of the two people. Here are the two versions.

According to Clarence Thomas, he hired Anita Hill at the urging of a friend because an official of the law firm at which she worked had advised her to leave.

According to Ms. Hill — both then and now — she was not “asked to leave” the law firm but was “in good standing” at the time.

This too was not just a question of “he said” and “she said.” An affidavit sworn by a former partner in that law firm supported Clarence Thomas’ version. That was ignored by most of the media.

Since the Senate has the power of subpoena, it was suggested that they issue a subpoena to get the law firm’s records, since that could provide a clue as to the credibility of the two people.

Senators opposed to the nomination of Judge Thomas voted down that request for the issuance of a subpoena.

After Anita Hill’s accusations, a group of female members of Congress staged a melodramatic march up the Capitol steps, with the TV cameras rolling, demanding that the Senate “get to the bottom of this.”

But “getting to the bottom of this” apparently did not include issuing a subpoena that could have shown conclusively who was truthful and who was not.

In another instance, there was already hard evidence but it too was ignored. Clarence Thomas said that Anita Hill had initiated a number of phone calls to him, over the years, after she had left the agency where they both worked. She said otherwise. But a phone log from the agency showed that he was right.

The really fatal fact about Anita Hill’s accusations was that they were first made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in confidence, and she asked that her name not be mentioned when the accusations were presented to Judge Thomas by those trying to pressure him to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Think about it: The accusations referred to things that were supposed to have happened when only two people were present.

If the accusations were true, Clarence Thomas would automatically know who originated them. Anita Hill’s request for anonymity made sense only if the charges were false.

From High-Tech Lynching to Impeachment

Someday historians will acknowledge the direct causal relationship between the near high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas and the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Liberal partisans such as Nina Totenberg, disguised as reporters, contrived as feminists to enrage much of the world against Clarence Thomas for alleged offenses which, in the wake of Clinton's sordid grotesqueries and felonies committed during the Monica Lewinsky affair, can only be considered trivial. What exactly did Thomas do to Anita Hill? She testified for the first time years after the alleged facts, that he (1) exclaimed that there was a "pubic hair" on his coke can and that he (2) had seen the movie Long Dong Silver. She also alleged that Thomas repeatedly (3) asked her out, (4) bragged of his sexual prowess, and (5) said that he had satisfied women with oral sex.

What Bill Clinton did a couple of years later was so egregious that it renders these unsubstantiated allegations merely frivolous, a fey neuroses of a bizarre era: Bill Clinton, in contrast to Thomas, sodomized a young intern in the Oval Office with a cigar and masturbated into the presidential sink; Bill Clinton repeatedly talked dirty to his young intern over the telephone while they mutually masturbated ; Bill Clinton suffered his young intern to fellate him while she was crouched under the presidential desk. I wonder what Nina Totenberg's reaction would have been had she learned that Bill Clinton had committed the atrocity of asking Monica Lewinsky out on a formal date?

Liberals say that the matter was all about redressing the imbalance of the power relationship between men and women, between master and servant, and between boss and employee. Of course, the relationship of Clinton and Lewinsky fit this template perfectly. But the Clintons did not stop there, they tag-teamed women who complained of sexual mistreatment (even actual assaults) by Bill Clinton and compounded his original crimes. Gennifer Flowers was made to lie publicly to protect Bill Clinton, to sign a perjurious affidavit denying their relationship, and suffered her apartment to be ransacked. Kathleen Willey was intimidated professionally by ominous strangers. Juanita Broderick was admonished by Hillary Clinton, the implication clear that Broderick was to remain silent about her rape by Bill Clinton. Those women whose silence and lies could not be assured by intimidation were vilified, publicly humiliated, and discredited as "sluts and nuts".

There are other such examples that make anyone who has even the most cavalier concern for women's rights righteously indignant. The Nina Totenberg's of the world never turned a hair.

It is hard to believe how the liberals succeeded with the Thomas hearings in convulsing a nation over these frivolous charges which were very likely untrue, explicitly denied, and otherwise uncorroborated. For three days the nation sat transfixed before its television sets absorbing a drama played out in the judiciary committee of the United States Senate.

As a result of these proceedings it is possible, if not likely, that four leftist women were added to the United States Senate as Democrats: Murray, Moseley Braun, Mikulski, Feinstein, and Boxer. Indeed, 1992, the year following the hearings, became known as the "Year of the Woman." The ripple effect from these proceedings extended beyond politics and beached again in the judiciary as Bill Clinton appointed to the Supreme Court an extreme feminist, an arch advocate for the ACLU, and, in my view, a bloodthirsty abortionist, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

It is not a stretch to assert that the election of Bill Clinton was clearly advanced by the contrived hysteria surrounding the Clarence Thomas hearings. Clinton's famous sales pitch, "vote for me and you get her-two for the price of one", referring to Hillary Rodham-Clinton, was simply echoing the drumbeating on behalf of Clinton and Rodham by the mainstream media press who had dubbed Hillary to be, "the smartest woman in the world" in the run-up to The Year of the Woman. Polls taken during the course of the hearings of Americans who actually watched the proceedings on television and drew their conclusions from what they saw, revealed that Americans believed Clarence Thomas and did not believe Anita Hill. Polls taken months and years later, after the mainstream media had its relentless way with the public, reflected precisely the opposite sentiment.

After Clinton attained the White House, and a coalition of Democrats passed The Violence against Women Act over the opposition of minority Republicans. That pernicious statute federalized domestic violence and distorted our precious presumption of innocence. If there is a saying of the law, "hard cases make bad law", surely there is a corollary, "mass psychosis makes for bad laws." Even the ACLU was led to criticize the excesses of the statute.

The Clintons and the Democrats shamelessly exploited the feminist pathology as the national psychosis played out in the Clarence Thomas hearings. They rode it into the White House. But irony had yet a card to play. In addition to the Violence Against Women Act, the Democrats contrived a law which made admissible into evidence alleged incidences of sexual-harassment which a defendant in such a lawsuit might have previously engaged in against a third unrelated party. The theory behind the law: once a cad always a cad; so evidence of bad behavior on one day is proof of bad behavior on another day. Bill Clinton signed this bill into law. With the stroke of his own pen, Bill Clinton ensured that his sexual peccadilloes against Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers, and especially, Monica Lewinsky would become the stuff of Paula Jones' lawsuit.

When the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, I was struck by the dichotomy between the reactions of folks here in Germany and back home in America. Later, I was to be struck by a similar dichotomy in reaction to the invasion of Iraq. The unanimity of opinion in Germany was striking. Germans simply could not believe America had lost its mind over a trivial matter like sex and they certainly could not believe that the world's only superpower would overthrow its government over a few bumps and tickles. Ultimately, the German view would come to prevail in America and the case in impeachment against Bill Clinton would not lie in the Senate. The assault on Clarence Thomas also failed, but no one ever said he got even any bumps or tickles in compensation for his ordeal. To the contrary and unto this day he is denied by the left even the decency of an acknowledgment that he has conducted himself utterly free of taint. Justice Thomas' only compensation would be the quiet inner satisfaction that comes from a righteous life, a "Normal Christian Life,"

I did not share the German view then and I do not hold it now. I believe that Bill Clinton committed high crimes and misdemeanors in trying to fix a civil trial (for money and reputation), that he conspired to fix a court case (with Monica Lewinsky, Betty Currie), that in furtherance of that conspiracy he suborned perjury (of Monica Lewinsky, Betty Currie), conspired to hide evidence, hid evidence (gifts hidden under the bed), and actually committed perjury (too notorious to require recounting). These were all felonies and as such they qualify as "high crimes and misdemeanors" under the constitutional standard for impeaching a president. Further, the president is the chief law enforcement officer in the land and by committing a string of felonies he breached his constitutional duty to see to the faithful execution of the laws-which misfeasance constitutes additional impeachable offenses. One need only consider the brouhaha over the alleged misrepresentations to Congress of Attorney General Gonzales, or the ordeal of Scooter Libby, to understand the gravity of the real offenses committed by Clinton.

As the Lewinsky impeachment drama played out and it became apparent that Slick would slither around impeachment, those of us who had a memory span larger than a gnat and so recalled the hysteria of the Clarence Thomas hearings, were utterly dumbfounded. I can recall explaining to my German friends and neighbors that the Monica Lewinsky affair was not just about sex but about the very real and important felonies I have described. One could tell from the expression on their faces that they had never heard this information before yet they received it quite skeptically even begrudgingly. I challenge any reader to lay out Bill Clinton’s crimes to your apolitical American friends and neighbors. I bet you will get the same reaction today of surprise, indifference, and even hostility from most Americans. Like the vines of Angkor Wat, time has shrouded Clinton's crimes.

It is a sure bet that few of them will remember the Clarence Thomas hearings, their context and aftermath, much less will they be aware of the chain of causation which led from the near high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton.

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