Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 21, 2010

This ain’t Honduras. They have an impeachment process that actually works. Ours puts Romeo on trial before a jury of Montagues and Capulets. And even if the defendant is actualy impeached, there’s not a chance the Senate will actually kick a Prez (or Veep) out of office, no matter who has the majority.

@AKHenderson

“there’s not a chance the Senate will actually kick a Prez (or Veep) out of office”

then they do not have “an impeachment process that actually works”

Really Henderson? Back in 99 during Clintons impeachment trial, a total of 5 Republicans crossed over and voted not guilty on the charge of Obstruction of Justice. If Obama was so much as found smoking in a non smoking area, how many in the party of “No” do you think would cross over today?

The Clintons had “Black Ops” research digging up dirt on every potential vote for removal from office. That’s how he remained in the White House, extortion.

Clarence Thomas never did one percent of the sexual harassment that Bill Clinton did. The hypocritical left once again shows its true colors.

blackash: The Clintons had “Black Ops” research digging up dirt on every potential vote for removal from office. I thought it was larry flint that had the dirt on the members of the house of representatives. if they weren’t dirty they had nothing to worry about, right…

Well said, plus4. And compared to Sotomayor and Kagan, Thomas is an all star. The left still cannot accept a conservative black man, as this undermines their entire philosophy of the poor darkie needing to be helped and nurtured by the superior and understanding white liberal.

so, the court would REALLY rock if all the members sat like lumps during presentations and never engaged in questioning (thinking). cool. got a point. the country would be much better off if the so-called conservatives in the house, the senate, radio, and television would follow his lead.

Do you really think that the left views minorities as anything other than a way to further their agenda you are sadly mistaken.

Thomas is an all-star moron, that’s for sure. He could not be more incompetent or less qualified. Even as a token he’s third-rate. I know I’m very much looking forward to Sotomayor and Kagan having a very long and very liberal tenure on the Court, and also to Barack Obama filling more Supreme Court vacancies. And all you conservatives can suck on that.

At the time, only blindered partisans believed that Anita Hill was making it up. She took a huge risk, in retrospect probably foolish, in asking the boys in the Senate to enact consequences for sexual harrassment in the workplace.

AS for being a rock star, which of Thomas’s published opinions is your favorite?

Clarence Thomas would the greatest insult to the institution of of the Supreme Court if it wasn’t for Roberts and Alito.

Clarence LIED when he denied Anita’s charges. This was clear to any thinking person.

Clarence LIED when he denied discussing Roe V. Wade with his fellow students.

This is even more clear. Can anyone imagine law students NOT discussing the most far reaching Court decision since Brown V. Board of Education?

LIES LIES LIES!!

The Senate should have thrown Thomas out on his ear and revoked his United States Court of Appeals seat. But unfortunately most liberals are not known for their courage. If only liberals would just start being real liberals we’d have half a chance of being a decent country.

OH! WELL!

Daddy Bush could not have insulted the country and the Court and African Americans more than by choosing Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall.

As far as “activist” judges Thomas, Alito, and Roberts top the list.

Our country is going to hell in a right-wing hand-basket because of these sleazy creeps.

What goes around, comes around. Sotomayor LIED in her confirmation hearings when she said she supported the 2nd Amendment and considered the individual right as decided in the D.C. suit, “settled law” and then in almost her first decision voted AGAINST this in Chicago vs McDonald. What hubris! It just proves that the American people will let politicians and judges do and say anything, as long as it reflects their personal biases, and both sides are equally guilty. They get power and money and you get the warm fuzzy feeling.

Ahhh! This is better. We’re getting back to our roots – politics!

I see the usual red herrings had to be thrown around today by the right. Really, you should rest easy on your worry of 2nd amendment rights being denied. What a waste of your blood pressure going up. I only wish we could limit the guns and destruction of human lives in this country. The gun lobby is too powerful, it will never happen, no matter how many kids have to be murdered at school or other innocent people. What happened to Clinton was a much more severe penalty than Thomas ever faced. Clinton had to answer many times over, including going before the public and an impeachment hearing. Thomas denied the allegations and was then appointed the Supreme Court. Some kind of hearing and punishment for him! There was no impeachment hearing for Thomas since the allegations were brought up during the process of confirmation. I will never forget the way that Anita Hill was treated and many others feel the same way. I strongly suspect that there never will be an impeachment hearing for Thomas not because he wasn’t guilty but because it is now over and done. But that never stops the right from dredging up whatever happened in the past, no matter how long ago, how ridiculous and false the comparison, or how irrelevant it may be to our current age.

Making “the call” on Thomas’ part, or making a big flap about it in the press were equally stupid, but not as stupid as Arlen Specter refusing to hear testimony during the hearing, or making Thomas himself speak up. Clarence has remained just as silent during oral argument while on the bench- and was flatly, totally, unqualified (ask anyone who was at EEOC under his “leadership”) for the bench– but Roberts is worse, and proved it when he couldn’t remember the oath of office.

Trudeau’s senile penchant for revising history has brought the Neolibs out in force today. He should use more caution in disseminating falsehoods among his readers whose “liberal” experience goes back only to Bush and Clinton. Mark tells them that Anita Hill “remains credible” after twenty years and will for another twenty. Do he and Trudeau think Bill Cinton’s credibility has grown (rather than vanished) since Clinton was impeached? What will be the verdict on Clinton ten years from now, when nobody will remember Anita Hill or Arlen Specter or Joe Biden?

Clarence Thomas just has to survive until Doonesbury has been retired to the archives along with the Justice’s tepid opinions. It’s doubtful that Mark will be around to keep a date with Mrs. Thomas in 2020, much less 2030.

I believe Anita Hill! I believe Anita Hill! I believe Anita Hill! I believe Anita Hill! I believe Anita Hill! I believe Anita Hill! I believe Anita Hill!

Clarence Thomas is one of the top ten threats to the United States Today.

He is a liar that should have never been appointed to anything.

Thanks a lot, Ron and daddy George!

@poohbear

If Thomas “lied,” it was to avoid being Borked by the ideologue Democrats. Here’s what Ted Kennedy said within an hour of Bork’s nomination in 1987:

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”

This lying, cartoonish distortion is very much in Trudeau’s vein. Neolibs are too eager to lap up Trudeau’s historical revisions. They need to examine what actually happened before offering their politically correct, or Doonesburied history.

I totally agree with Ted.

Robert Bork would have contributed to the destruction of the U.S. too.

Noecons are the History Distorters.

Just think of how distorted history would have been, 600mg at a time, if Grace had been slick enough to get by Hoover’s list.

Instead of “Tricky Dick” we’d be calling him “Trippy Dick”

Wow! Nixon on LSD. What a concept. I reluctantly thank you for this strange and wonderful trajectory alteration.

Well, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings are one American issue I have no trouble understanding. I spent that weekend glued to the TV. I was hypnotised. I believed her utterly, from first to last, because every word that rang in my ears echoed in my own experience.

At one point when she was testifying she stood there like a block of wood, blank, with no expression at all on her face. I felt like I understood this completely. I too had been in a very dangerous situation (more than once), where I was being attacked on all sides, where I had had to use all my energy to hold myself together (so I had no energy left to put an expression on my face), or I would have come apart and would have started sobbing hysterically. Men do not sympathise with such behaviour.

I could understand how puzzling the situation was for the men listening to her testify. They really just didn’t get it, even those of good will, no matter how hard they tried, and some were really trying very hard. One or two mentioned that they understood somewhat, because an elderly relative (mother? grandmother? I don’t remember) had told them about such experiences. And they couldn’t imagine that that person was making up a story - they saw how she felt telling about it. So these men didn’t have the otherwise perfectly understandable reaction of saying that this couldn’t have happened, it must be unreal - because it was outside their experience of reality.

Like people who have fought in a war trying to explain it to people who haven’t.

Anita Hill did not volunteer to testify. She was under subpoena and under oath, and passed the lie detector test. Nothing in her subsequent career suggests dishonesty on her part. Other women who knew and/or worked with Thomas, but were not subpoenaed at the time, have since come forward to corroborate Hill, and give other examples of Thomas’s conduct.

Mrs. Thomas was asking Hill to confess to perjury, which is what apologizing would amount to. And she did it on an answering machine! How weird is that? Face-to-face, telephone, even a letter would have been more normal. No wonder Hill thought the message was a hoax, and perhaps one with a deeper purpose.

We all want to believe the honesty of people we like, and we are all ready to forgive the faults of people when they do good in other areas. Clarence Thomas has some admirable qualities. Why do his friends and supporters insist that he is infallible?

Notice that no one posts the opinion that the public just doesn’t know, and can’t know, the truth on this one. It’s true, I lean on the side of Hill because the evidence leads me that way. But I could be wrong, too.

Hill perhaps lied, Thomas perhaps lied. I don’t know. But I am sure of this, anyone who says he KNOWS the truth, is certainly and assuredly LYING.

Doughfoot – so right!! Anita Hill had no desire to get into the fray, but when she was informed of how important her experience & testimony were to the future of the country, she realized that she owed it to the country to come forward. She paid a heavy price for her bravery & honesty – and we all knew how it would turn out anyway.

As for all the diversions to Clinton – what he did with “that woman” was stupid, but it was not something that he should have ever been asked in front of a Grand Jury. It had no bearing on what they were trying to find out, it was simply done as entrapment, and it was the question that should not have been asked.

Writes Sandfan: “The left still cannot accept a conservative black man, as this undermines their entire philosophy of the poor darkie needing to be helped and nurtured by the superior and understanding white liberal.”

Bull.

This tired bit of nonsense comes up every time somebody gets critical of Clarence Thomas and his self-righteous whining about his “high-tech lynching,” or of Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele. The left would have opposed Thomas regardless of his race, simply for being a conservative. A big portion of the political middle turned against him because Anita Hill testified under oath, and later passed a polygraph test, accusing him of sexual harassment when she worked for him at (ironically) the EEOC. I suppose the polygraph was high-tech, but the rest of it was no lynching.

It would, however, be accurate to write “The left still cannot accept a conservative,” and leave off the rest of the sentence.

As usual, Doonesbury hits the nail on the head. Virginia Thomas called Anita hill to distract from the stories about her questionable activities with her ultra-regressive PAC and how her work there endangers her husband’s disinterest as a justice on the Supreme Court.

Her call succeeded in reminding us of Justice Thomas’s mendacity & prevarications during his hearings and of how close was his confirmation vote. Dan Quayle presided that vote in case of a tie, and he was only two votes away from needing to actually do something.

It also spurred more attention on the new admission of Thomas’s former girlfriend that Anita Hill was telling the truth: “Clarence Thomas’s Ex-Girlfriend Backs Anita Hill in Memoir Detailing His ‘Hobby’”.

Neolibs make lousy historians because their selective memory perverts their judgment. Thus Anita Hill “paid a heavy price for her bravery and honesty” whereas Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky are dismissed as Republican stooges. And Clarence Thomas is vilified for lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee whereas President Clinton is excused for his flat lie to the American people because his fellatio in the Oval Office (as compared with Thomas’s remark about pubic hair) “is not something [Clinton] should have been asked about in front of a Grand Jury.”

Blindly partisan historical judgments like these are right up (or down) there with Fox news.

Speaking of bad history, claiming the Senate is incapable of removing a sitting president through the impeachment process is ill-informed.

Richard Nixon resigned precisely because a delegation of Republican senators headed by Barry Goldwater visited him to deliver the message that if the impeachment trial were to take place, there were not enough votes in the Senate to acquit him.

This was at a time when the Democrats held 57 seats, ten short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction (if indeed they all voted to convict). It was apparently also at a time when Republicans had principles.

Gennifer Flowers, Juanita Broaddrick, Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Paula Jones, sexual assault allegations by most of these women and others, sexual harrassment as defined by Federal statutes against Ms. Lewinsky. This is the legacy of President Clinton, and you hypocritical lefties talk endlessly about one allegation of sexual harrassment against Clarence Thomas as if it were a capital offense. Why not open BOTH of your eyes and not just the left one? Don’t excoriate Thomas and ignore Clinton’s substantially worse record. Of course, it was just a vast right-wing conspiracy which led all of these women and more to allege improper and illegal behavior, and Santa Claus will be bringing lots of toys to all you good little blinder-wearing liberals.