And This Is A Defense?

Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham. If it's an ad hominem attack, can Ann Coulter be far behind?

Coulter, the nasty Queen of Mean, declared Monday night on GOP TV's Hannity

Liberals detest, detest, detest conservative blacks..... This is now the second time a conservative black has had outrageous and what appear to be false allegations leveled against him.

According to The Huffington Post (from which account this was taken), Coulter was referring to Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, whose victimization thus apparently was tempered.

Americans for Herman Cain, in a fund-raising letter claiming Herman Cain is a serious threat to the re-election of Barack Obama, is even more explicit, claiming

So the left wing media has decided to destroy him. Like they did to Clarence Thomas, they are engaging in a "high tech" lynching by smearing his reputation and attacking his character.

Coulter, perhaps dreaming of those fine old days when human beings were owned, added "our blacks are so much better than their blacks" ("our blacks?" "their blacks?").

When Clarence Thomas accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks," no one was called to testify to buttress the contention of Anita Hill that Thomas had harassed her sexually while he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

There was, however, someone who had been supoenaed, flew to Washington, and waited three days before the Committee decided not to call her. When Florence George Graves, then a Radcliffe Public Policy Fellow at Harvard University, conducted the research for her article which appeared in The Washington Post on November 20, 2003, she found Wright bore no ill will toward Thomas when he fired her. She immediately found employment with the Charlotte Observer, who received a very favorable recommendation from Thomas. The sexually explicit behavior exhibited by Thomas toward Hill appeared to Wright very similar to that which she faced from Thomas, though she considers herself a very strong-willed woman who was not intimidated by her boss' actions.

Opinions differ as to why Angela Wright never appeared before the Committee, although the subpoena eventually was withdrawn and the witness to the Supreme Court nominee's fascination with the female anatomy believed the Senators did not want her to testify. The spirit of the deliberations which led to the decision not to call Wright was captured by the late Senator Paul Simon (D-Ill.), who

remembers a meeting of the Judiciary committee members in Senator Ted Kennedy's office on Sunday- it was about 5 p.m. after a recess in the hearings announced- there was a discussion ("I don't know if it came to a formal vote") leading to a consensus among Democrats and Republicans not to call Wright. He recalls that the Republicans felt she "confirmed the sexual harassment side of things," and the Democrats feared that she had been fired by Thomas, Wright might appear less credible. He says no Senator argued that Wright had to be called.

Because so much was going on, Simon says, he did not read Angela Wright's testimony until after the hearings. That's when he was "stunned" to learn that Rose Jourdain had corroborated Wrights' account. Had he known this when the senators convened Sunday, "I would have insisted that she be called." Simon says he thinks Wrights's account, buttressed by Jourdain's, "would have turned the situation around.

"First, the Senate shouldn't be approving that kind of conduct," he says. "But the second factor was the truthfulness factor. Thomas was under oath. Anita Hill was under oath. And when you add the Angela Wright testimony to it, I think it's fairly clear that the person who was not telling the turth was Clarence Thomas."

Further light on the decison not to call Wright was shone by Cynthia Hogan( counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Biden), who

told Kennedy School Researcher Dickert that as the final arrangements were made for an ambulance to bring Wright's corroborator, Jourdain from her home to the hearings, "out of the blue, the Republicans- who were clearly terrified of Angela Wright- said "we don't want her to testify, and we will accept the transcript of her deposition unrebutted." To a lawyer," she explained, this means "they are accepting it as basically ture, so we thought this was a tremendous victory."

Given the fixation on race and obsession with victimization among many conservative Republicans, it is virtually impossible to discern the impulse behind their acrimonious demonization of liberals, though their hostility toward Mitt Romney is the more immediate motivation. Virtually lost in history (rarely reported and little known), however, is the acceptance of Judiciary Committee Republicans of the testimony of Angela Wright, which would have convinced all but the most diehard supporters of Clarence Thomas that the Supreme Court nominee had lied under oath. Not only would he have been denied confirmation, but we all would have been spared the blatherings of the likes of Limbaugh, Ingraham, Hannity, and Coulter, who base their support of Herman Cain on the assumption, unrebutted, that Clarence Thomas was truthful.

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