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Frank Rich, The New York Times, October 7, 2007

What’s the difference between a low-tech lynching and a high-tech lynching? A high-tech lynching brings a tenured job on the Supreme Court and a $1.5 million book deal. A low-tech lynching, not so much.

Pity Clarence Thomas. Done in by what he calls “left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony” — as he describes anyone who challenged his elevation to the court — he still claims to have suffered as much as African-Americans once victimized by “bigots in white robes.” Since kicking off his book tour on “60 Minutes” last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank, often abetted by a press claque as fawning as his No. 1 fan, Rush Limbaugh.

We are always at a crossroads with race in America, and so here we are again. The rollout of Justice Thomas’s memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” is not happening in a vacuum. It follows a Supreme Court decision (which he abetted) outlawing voluntary school desegregation plans in two American cities. It follows yet another vote by the Senate to deny true Congressional representation to the majority black District of Columbia. It follows the decision by the leading Republican presidential candidates to snub a debate at a historically black college as well as the re-emergence of a low-tech lynching noose in Jena, La.

Perhaps most significant of all, Mr. Thomas’s woe-is-me tour unfolds against the backdrop of the presidential campaign of an African-American whose political lexicon does not include martyrdom or rage. “My Grandfather’s Son” may consciously or not echo the title of Barack Obama’s memoir of genealogy and race, “Dreams From My Father,” but it might as well be written in another tongue.

It’s useful to watch Mr. Thomas at this moment, 16 years after his riveting confirmation circus. He is a barometer of what has and has not changed since then because he hasn’t changed at all. He still preaches against black self-pity even as he hyperbolically tries to cast his Senate cross-examination by Joe Biden as tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan assassination of Medgar Evers. He still denies that he is the beneficiary of the very race-based preferences he deplores. He still has a dubious relationship with the whole truth and nothing but, and not merely in the matter of Anita Hill.

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Jon Wiener, The Huffington Post, October 5, 2007

When George Bush and Dick Cheney talk about their plans to bomb Iran, they are told “You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated”–that’s what a Republican former intelligence official told legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. “But,” the former official went on, “Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

I recently spoke with Hersh, whose new piece, “Target Iran,” is featured in The New Yorker this week.

When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, “Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of – we might as well say it – Israeli and Jewish input.” He added the obvious: “a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns” from Jewish contributors.

But while Democrats argue that we must “do something” about an Iranian nuclear threat, Hersh says the White House has concluded their own effort to convince Americans that Iran poses an imminent threat has “failed.” Apparently the public that bought the story of WMD in Iraq is now singing the classic Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Moreover, Hersh reports, “the general consensus of the American intelligence community is that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb” – so the public is right to be skeptical.

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Eric Alterman, The Nation, October 15, 2007

Having exposed their country to the ignominy of certain defeat in Iraq, the Bush Administration and its neoconservative allies are seeking to salvage their crumbling reputations by blaming their critics for the catastrophe their policies have wrought. We are witnessing the foundation for a post-Iraq “stab in the back” campaign.

The tactic–Dolchstoßlegende, which means, literally, “dagger stab legend”–is associated with attacks by German anti-Semites on Jews in the aftermath of World War I and is a familiar response for frustrated American right-wingers when reality fails to live up to their ideological fantasies. Following the inevitable collapse of nationalist China, unhinged accusations of a liberal conspiracy inside the US government that purposely “lost” China to the Commies ruled the foreign policy debate. Consider these words from GOP Senator William Jenner of Indiana: “This country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union…. [A] secret invisible government…[has] led our country down the road to destruction.” The China lobby–the AIPAC of its day–tirelessly policed American politics to insure that no one with national aspiration dared recognize the reality of the Communist Chinese victory.

During Vietnam, Ronald Reagan tried to blame protesters for killing troops, charging, “Some American will die tonight because of the activity in our streets.” The right created the myth of antiwar protesters spitting on soldiers, although a detailed study by Jerry Lembcke, in his The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, found not a single verifiable incident of such behavior. And while it is a given among conservatives–and even reporters–that critical media coverage somehow hampered the war effort, Daniel Hallin’s The Uncensored War notes that most reports, particularly on television, rarely deviated from patriotic, pro-American assumptions.

Indeed, the Army’s official history of the media’s role in the conflict, published by the Army Center of Military History, explicitly rejects this line. None of this prevented Norman Podhoretz from reviving the charge in 1982 with a thinly researched book-length essay called Why We Were in Vietnam. Fortunately, the country was not in the mood; the vast majority of Americans surveyed over the past thirty years have said US involvement was a mistake from the start. (Nowhere in his book did Podhoretz admit that one of those leftists calling explicitly for a US defeat was the then-editor of Commentary–a fellow by the name of “Norman Podhoretz.” He argued in 1971 that a Vietcong victory was preferable to “the indefinite and unlimited bombardment by American pilots in American planes of every country in that already devastated region.”)

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Helen Thomas, Common Dreams, October 5, 2007

President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party’s leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.

Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.

Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?

When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: “It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting.”

Obama dodged, too: “I think it would be irresponsible” to say what he would do as president.

Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: “I cannot make that commitment.”

They have left the voters little choice with those answers.

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Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly, November 2007

I assume the Secret Service agents will arrive first, checking out everyone in sight. But suddenly the door opens, and in she comes, all alone, dressed casually in an inexpensive gray dress with a matching cotton sweater, her sandy-blond hair held back with a rubber band.

“So is this okay? Mexican food?” asks Jenna Bush. “I figured it might make you feel more at home.”

It’s a mild July evening in Washington, D.C., and Jenna has agreed to meet me for dinner at the upscale Oyamel Cocina restaurant, between the Capitol and the White House, where Jenna is, as she likes to say, “living with the folks.” When I ask her why her Secret Service detail is not with her, she shrugs and says, “I made them drop me off at the corner. I don’t want to cause a scene.”

At 25, she is a striking, slim young woman, her arms and legs perfectly toned thanks to daily 6 a.m. workouts at the White House gym or a health club she frequents. She is also unmistakably her father’s daughter, with the same brown eyes, the same good-natured grin that slides sideways across her face, and, yes, the same saucy personality, full of sardonic asides.

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Anita Hill, The New York Times, October 2, 2007

On Oct. 11, 1991, I testified about my experience as an employee of Clarence Thomas’s at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I stand by my testimony.

Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.

But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.

Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

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