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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (2655)	6/25/2003 8:12:05 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793896

CoulterGeist. Good name. She needs something to get her up in the ratings again. Her recent columns have not been much, IMO. Dowd had a mean one this morning. She is getting more and more like Coulter. Could Thomas Be Right? By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON What a cunning man Clarence Thomas is. He knew that he could not make a powerful legal argument against racial preferences, given the fact that he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race. So he made a powerful psychological argument against what the British call "positive discrimination," known here as affirmative action. Justice Thomas's dissent in the 5-4 decision preserving affirmative action in university admissions has persuaded me that affirmative action is not the way to go. The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received. It's poignant, really. It makes him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race. Other justices rely on clerks and legal footnotes to help with their opinions; Justice Thomas relies on his id, turning an opinion on race into a therapeutic outburst. In his dissent, he snidely dismisses the University of Michigan Law School's desire to see minority faces in the mix as "racial aesthetics," giving the effort to balance bigotry in society the moral weight of a Benetton ad. The phrase "racial aesthetics" would be more appropriately applied to W.'s nominating convention in Philadelphia, when the Republicans put on a minstrel show for the white fat cats in the audience. Justice Thomas scorns affirmative action as "a faddish slogan of the cognoscenti." Quoting Frederick Douglass on the "Negro" 140 years ago, he urges: " `All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! . . . Your interference is doing him positive injury.' " He is at the pinnacle, an African-American who succeeded in getting past the Anita Hill sexual harassment scandal by playing the race card, calling the hearing "a high-tech lynching," and who got a $1.5 million advance to write his African-American Horatio Alger story, "From Pin Point to Points After." So why, despite his racial blessings, does he come across as an angry, bitter, self-pitying victim? It's impossible not to be disgusted at someone who could benefit so much from affirmative action and then pull up the ladder after himself. So maybe he is disgusted with his own great historic ingratitude. When he switched from a Democrat to a conservative as a young man, he knew that he would be a hotter commodity in politics. But he also knew that it would bring him the scorn of blacks who deemed him a pawn of the white establishment ? people like Justice Thurgood Marshall, who ridiculed Clarence Thomas and others as "goddamn black sellouts" for benefiting from affirmative action and then denigrating it. As Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer write in "Strange Justice," Mr. Thomas himself complained in a 1987 speech that, to win acceptance in conservative ranks, "a black was required to become a caricature of sorts, providing sideshows of anti-black quips and attacks." (Just as blonde conservative pundettes flash long legs and sneer at feminism.) When the 43-year-old was nominated by Bush 41 with the preposterous claim that he was "the best qualified" man for the job, G.O.P. strategists diverted attention away from the judge's scant credentials and controversial record by pushing his inspiring life story, grandson of a sharecropper and son of a Georgia woman who picked the meat out of crabshells. But it's as if Justice Thomas has been swallowed by his own personal drama, just as Bob Dole and Bob Kerrey were swallowed by their gripping personal dramas on the presidential campaign trail. Mr. Thomas is so blinded by his own autobiography he can no longer focus on bigger issues of morality and justice. Having used his personal story to get on the court, he is now left to worry that his success is not personal enough. President Bush, the Yale legacy who also disdains affirmative action, is playing affirmative action politics in the preliminary vetting of a prospective Supreme Court nominee, Alberto Gonzales. No doubt Bush 43 will call Mr. Gonzales the best qualified man for the job, rather than the one best qualified to help harvest the 2004 Hispanic vote. President Bush and Justice Thomas have brought me around. I don't want affirmative action. I want whatever they got.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (2655)	6/25/2003 12:22:03 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793896

I wasn't the only one to pick up on Dowds awful column today. Here is Sullivan's take. THE 'INGRATITUDE' OF THOMAS: It would be hard to find a more appalling example of racial animus than in Maureen Dowd's column this morning. For some reason I guess I do understand, Clarence Thomas isn't just opposed by many on the Left; he is hated. He is hated because he is, in Dowd's extraordinary formulation, guilty of "a great historical ingratitude." The good negroes, in Dowd's liberal-racist world, are those grateful to their massas in the liberal hierarchy: they are grateful to Howell and Gerald and Arthur; and they know their place. For them to express the psychological torment of being advanced for racist reasons, to explain in graphic, brave and bold terms the complexity of emotions many African-Americans feel as 'beneficiaries' of racial preferences, is unacceptable. To describe such a person who has been courageous enough to put these feelings into a powerful dissent as "barking mad" is nothing short of disgusting. Yes, there are all sorts of psychological inconsistencies in Thomas' journey. But that, in part, is the point! If Dowd supports "diversity" as a good thing in elite institutions, why isn't it a good thing for one black Justice to contribute his own experience as part of a landmark judicial ruling? Of course I don't know whether Dowd supports diversity in this sense. That would require her to argue something - of which she is apparently incapable. And then Dowd, of all people, complains that Thomas is more interested in his own personal dramas than "bigger issues of morality and justice." When was the last time you read a Dowd column that grappled with "bigger issues of morality and justice"? andrewsullivan.com