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Clarence Thomas give a dinner Monday night attended by some of our favorite writers. There have been many reactions and we will have a few tonight. The first blog post from The Right Coast has a link (via Instapundit) to the 60 minutes interview from Sunday night, so we’ll start with that.
The Captain was there too.
Monday evening, I attended a two-hour dinner event at the Heritage Foundation with Justice Clarence Thomas, his wife Virginia, and a small number of other bloggers and New Media members. It confirmed for me that the media has never gotten a grasp of the man under the robes, possibly because they have not spent even the small amount of time with him that we did tonight and that Steve Kroft did with his 60 Minutes interview — and they have missed a real story from that failure. And while the nominal reason for the evening was his book launch — and we each received autographed copies — it turned into a wide-ranging conversation that had little to do with the book.
The evening started with Justice Thomas greeting us, taking pictures and chatting us up a bit. He asked me what I wrote about at Captain’s Quarters, and I replied, “Just about anything — politics, culture, foreign policy, and Notre Dame football,” at which he let loose his unique gust of laughter. “Notre Dame football?” he asked incredulously. “You’d better stick with foreign policy this year!” …
Kate O’Bierne with a Corner post.
I had the pleasure of joining about 20 members of the new media for a dinner with Amazon’s #1 author for dinner this evening. Justice Thomas was wise, candid, and upbeat. The “controversial†justice stresses that he hasn’t had a negative incident in his 16 years on the Court. He explains it is humbling that he is treated so well by audiences he addresses and others he meets. He cheerfully notes that when he has encountered some opposition on university campuses, “it is always the faculty, never the students.†He laughingly allowed that he would have to be “a Middle East dictator with nuclear weapons to be invited to Columbia,†adding that it wasn’t an invitation he was interested in. …
Paul Mirengoff of Power Line.
This evening, in honor of the publication of My Grandfather’s Son, the Heritage Foundation hosted a dinner for Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, along with a group of conservative journalists and “new media” types. I have been at social gatherings where Justice Thomas was present but had never actually met him before. Those who know him have told me how warm and gracious he is, and these qualities certainly were evident tonight.
Justice Thomas began his after-dinner remarks by saying he wishes the new media had been around at the time of his confirmation hearings because it “gets beyond the monopoly” held by the liberal media. In this connection, he noted that the old media is misrepresenting the tone and the point of his book by focusing on “anger.” The real tone and point of the book, he said, is quite different. Thomas believes his life story will offer insight and hope, especially to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, he seeks to counter the message, all too prevalent in the black community, that studying hard is a tantamount to being white ,and to call attention to an older tradition in the black community that focused on scholastic achievement. That, of course, is the tradition his grandfather represents. …
Jim Taranto was at the dinner too. He has a couple of posts centered on the lovely Anita Hill.
John Fund with a short on the phony soldiers flap.
Anne Applebaum writes more on what she calls the “Nonstop Thrill Ride of Russian Politics.”
LA Times op-ed says Mugabe has always been a thug.
… The characterization of Mugabe as a good man gone wrong extends to popular culture as well. In the 2005 political thriller “The Interpreter,” Nicole Kidman played a dashing, multilingual exile from the fictional African country of Matobo, whose ruler was once a soft-spoken, cerebral schoolteacher who liberated his country from a white minority regime but became a despot. Mugabe certainly understood the likeness; he accused Kidman and her costar, Sean Penn, of being part of a CIA plot to oust him.
But this popular conception of Mugabe — propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s — is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state. Characteristic of this historical revisionism is former Newsweek southern Africa correspondent Joshua Hammer, writing recently in the liberal Washington Monthly that “more than a quarter-century after leading his guerrilla army to victory over the racist regime of Ian Smith in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, President Robert Mugabe has morphed into a caricature of the African Big Man.” …
Cafe Hayek picks a movie – “Lives of Others.”
Mark Steyn was in Macleans reacting to American World War ethnocentrism.
… The other day, Senator Thompson was on the campaign trail and told his audience: “This country has shed more blood for the liberty of other countries than all other countries put together.”
More than “all other countries put together”? As I told our friends to the south, I’m the most pro-American non-American on the planet, but, if that’s the new default braggadocio, include me out. The Washington Post’s attempt to refute Thompson by championing the Soviets was as predictable as it was absurd — the Reds certainly shed a lot of blood but not obviously in the cause of liberty. Yet slightly more startling was the number of pro-Fred American conservatives who sent me scornful emails belittling the efforts of the Commonwealth.
As old-timers will tell you at Royal Canadian Legion halls, the Dominion “shed more blood” proportionately than the United States in the Second World War. Newfoundland — not yet part of Canada — had a higher per capita casualty rate than America. No surprise about that: Newfs and Canucks sailed off to battle two years ahead of the Yanks. And, if we’re talking hard numbers, almost as many Britons died in the war as Americans, despite the latter having thrice the population. …
John Stossel continues his series on health care insurance.
Candidates for president have plans to get more people health insurance. Some would compel us to buy it; others would use the tax code to encourage that. Regardless, insurance is the magic that will solve our health-care problems.
But contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s not those without health insurance who are the problem, but rather those with it. They make medical care more expensive for everyone.
We’d each be better off if we paid all but the biggest medical bills out of pocket and saved insurance for catastrophic events. Truly needy people would rely on charity, not government, because once government gets involved, unintended bad consequences abound. …