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An HBO hit job on Clarence Thomas? Of course! We have here yet another biased outrage from the deep thinking bien pensants in Hollywood as they signal what they presume is their virtue. Noted liberal Stuart Taylor, who covered the hearings provides some facts.
… As a reporter who covered the at times stomach-churning hearings, I wondered how “Confirmation” would handle a story that ultimately boiled down, as the saying goes, to one of he said-she said—he denied all and stunned the senators by accusing them of staging a “high-tech lynching.” She said he pestered her for dates and subjected her to disgusting, sexually charged conversation.
Despite a surface appearance of fairness, “Confirmation” makes clear how it wants the hearings to be remembered: Ms. Hill told the whole truth and Mr. Thomas was thus a desperate, if compelling, liar. Her supporters were noble; his Republican backers were scheming character assassins.
This is consistent with how the media conveyed the story at the time and, especially, in the years hence. Yet immediately after millions of people witnessed the hours of televised testimony, polls showed that Americans by a margin of more than 2 to 1 found Judge Thomas more believable than Ms. Hill. Viewers of “Confirmation” were deprived of several aspects of the story that might have made them, too, skeptical of Ms. Hill. The most-salient of many examples:
The movie ignores Ms. Hill’s failure to mention either in her initial written statement to the Judiciary Committee or in her FBI interview some of the most shocking charges about Mr. Thomas’s behavior that she added in testimony three weeks later. Worse, when asked about these omissions, Ms. Hill claimed that the FBI agents had told her that she need not “discuss things that were too embarrassing.” Both agents flatly contradicted this.
“Confirmation” also doesn’t mention …
Columnist Star Parker, herself a black woman, has more in a column titled The Liberal War on Black Men.
… Instead of the entertainment industry choosing to make a film about Thomas’s remarkable life and achievements, HBO has now delivered to us “Confirmation,” which dumps into the living rooms of Americans all the garbage of those hearings, breathing new life into the liberal campaign to undermine and destroy the credibility of a brilliant, conservative jurist who happens to be black.
It might be conceivable that HBO would choose to produce a feature to memorialize those hearings if any of Hill’s allegations against Thomas were even partially substantiated. But none were. So, where is the news here? Where is the history here? Particularly, given the enormous personal cost that Thomas was forced to pay by giving public airing of Hill’s unsubstantiated crude allegations, why would HBO choose to drag him, and the American public, through this again? What does this say about the “entertainment” business and about HBO? …
… And, maybe most importantly, the feature ignores the fact that in the numerous senior management positions that Thomas held in his career, no one who worked for Thomas ever stepped forth to give credibility to Hill.
Clarence Thomas should be a role model for young black men. But advancing human liberty and dignity is not the priority for liberals. Their priority is advancing their left wing agenda and using blacks as a tool to do it.
Ongoing liberal attacks on conservative values, and perpetuation of stereotypes of black men as sexual predators, that the HBO production plays into in order to undermine Clarence Thomas, worsens the crisis among young black men that liberals pretend to care about. Programs, such as President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” program, launched to address the crisis among black men, will go nowhere as long as this continues.
Recently, there was consternation in some black circles about underrepresentation of black talent in the Oscar nominations. Perhaps blacks should be more concerned about the ongoing war on black men and entertainment industry exploitation and perpetuation of destructive black stereotypes.
Victor Davis Hanson exposes the “air-brushing” Stalinists in the administration.
Last week, French president Francois Hollande met President Obama in Washington to discuss joint strategies for stopping the sort of radical Islamic terrorists who have killed dozens of innocents in Brussels, Paris, and San Bernardino in recent months. Hollande at one point explicitly referred to the violence as “Islamist terrorism.”
The White House initially deleted that phrase from the audio translation of the official video of the Hollande-Obama meeting, only to restore it when questioned. Did the Obama administration assume that if the public could not hear the translation of the French president saying “Islamist terrorism,” then perhaps Hollande did not really say it — and therefore perhaps Islamist terrorism does not really exist?
The Obama administration must be aware that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union wiped clean all photos, recordings, and films of Leon Trotsky on orders from Josef Stalin. Trotsky was deemed politically incorrect, and therefore his thoughts and photos simply vanished.
The Library of Congress, under pressure from DartmouthCollege students, recently banned not just the term “illegal alien” in subject headings for literature about immigration, but “alien” as well. Will changing the vocabulary mean that from now on, foreign nationals who choose to enter and reside in the United States without being naturalized will not be in violation of the law and will no longer be considered citizens of their homeland?
Did the Library of Congress ever read the work of the Greek historian Thucydides, who warned some 2,500 years ago that in times of social upheaval, partisans would make words “change their ordinary meaning and . . . take that which was now given them.” …
Egads! John Kerry went to Hiroshima. David Harsanyi comments.
When John Kerry toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum this week before meeting foreign ministers at the G-7 Summit, Reuters reports that he had witnessed “haunting displays [of] photographs of badly burned victims, the tattered and stained clothes they wore and statues depicting them with flesh melting from their limbs.”
“It is a stunning display. It is a gut-wrenching display,” explained Kerry. “It is a reminder of the depth of the obligation every one of us in public life carries … to create and pursue a world free from nuclear weapons.”
Iran exempted, of course.
But, really, is this the lesson of Hiroshima? That those in public life have an obligation to do away with nuclear weapons? A lot of people might argue that existence of those weapons have saved lives from broader world conflicts and conventional warfare. That includes ending the Second World War sooner.
Yesterday, The Washington Post dutifully reported that, “In Hiroshima, Kerry won’t apologize for atomic bombs dropped on Japan.” Technically, he didn’t. What we witnessed was one of the administration’s inverted non-apology apologies.
Barack Obama will also travel to Japan next month for the G-7. There’s a lot of speculation he will visit Hiroshima and offer some sort of apology. (If we’re to believe WikiLeaks, U.S. officials have been toying with the idea of having Obama say sorry for Hiroshima for a while now. And it comports well with his history.)
It would not be a great leap for Obama. …
GOOD CARTOONS TOO