At the time, NBC's Saturday Night Live found humor in the appalling hearing with a series of skits. In one, the all-male panel of senators brushed aside Hill and focused on asking Thomas for dating advice in Washington based on his experiences as a boss.
That was fanciful, of course. But the hearing transcript shows that Alabama Democrat Howell Heflin was so clueless in his ability to conduct an informed questioning that he thought film testimony referred to the Treasure Island character Long John Silver, who was famous in Disney movies and TV. Heflin himself had a moment of unwanted fame on a separate occasion. He mistakenly pulled from his coat a pair of panties at the Senate dining room to use as a handkerchief, later explaining they were his wife's.
Thomas denied Hill's porno claims specifically and linked them closely to his overall piety and the oppression that blacks have faced throughout U.S. history.
My reading of the evidence is that Thomas clearly perjured himself to win his lifetime Supreme Court appointment by a 52-48 Senate vote. Furthermore, he has continued lying about the matter since, including in his 2007 best-selling autobiography, My Grandfather's Son.
At the
Press Club, McEwen, herself of mixed race, said his book is a fraud in
other respects, including the image that Thomas created of venerating his
grandfather. She says Thomas refused her entreaties to visit his
grandfather on his deathbed because of their animosities, but did adopt many times a viciously
anti-black slogan inherited from his grandfather relying on the
"N-word."
She told the Press Club audience Oct. 26 that Thomas was her "best friend" for a period when they were lovers and she introduced him to sexual fantasies, the Plato's Retreat sex club and "threesomes" in the 1980s. But she says she decided to break up because of the tensions he imposed on himself by his all-out ambitions to persuade religious evangelicals and other conservatives to support his career ambitions.
Therefore, Cain's attempt to tie his credibility to that of Thomas
should not be the end of the matter, even if a fourth woman had not
stepped forward Nov. 7. The fourth woman provided the most specific allegations yet of
Cain misbehavior when he led the National Restaurant Association in the
1990s.
Instead, Cain's race-based rhetoric should prompt more research on both Cain and Thomas to get to the bottom of the facts about both of them and their alleged puppet-masters once and for all.
They share a lot more common ground than their friendship, their roots in Georgia as black conservatives and a longstanding trail of sex harassment allegations now blighting each man's reputation with their religious right base. Each has been funded by billionaire conservatives -- and been accused of serving as front men for an ultra-right agenda of pounding down the middle class and poor under a veneer of phony religious piety, legal "originalism" and economic fairness.
I
had a front row seat in covering Cain's Oct. 31 speech at the National
Press Club just after the scandal broke, and tried to reflect in story
his compelling personality, his denials and his oratorical gifts. In Cain Sells Vision, Denies Harassment, Sings Spiritual,
I wrote, "GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain Oct. 31 denied a
claim of staff sexual harassment and outlined at a National Press Club
lunch how he would revitalize the country with his tax plan. The former
businessman and radio host finished his Q&A by singing a
deep-voiced version of a spiritual."
That was a straight news story, and I declined at the time to give my opinion about any of it to a magazine publisher at my table who sought it. But this column is analysis, based on new developments and outside research, excerpted from diverse sources below:
Cain,
his cigarette-smoking campaign manager Mark Block and his chief
economic adviser Rich Lowrie are all affiliated with the Koch brothers and
their organizations. The Sunshine Foundation and New York writer Jane Mayer, among others,
have described how the funding for Cain is not immediately apparent because much of it comes through a lecture agency. Critics say this has
special relevance to the presidential campaign because Cain's signature
9-9-9 economic plan benefits the top 20% of wealthy Americans,
especially those such as the Koch brothers, while creating new economic
hardships for others.
Cain, Block and Lowrie are each closely associated with the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity advocacy group that hosted Cain on Friday. That's where Cain told the crowd, including David Koch, "I'm the Koch brothers' brother from another mother...and proud of it!" (adapted from a line in a movie) as the conservative crowd roared approval.
Cain has denied both sexual and financial wrongdoing, as indicated in the columns cited below. This is congruent with the Thomas denial of Anita Hill's claims in 1991. In soaring rhetoric, Thomas expressed outrage that Hill could suggest such things as his enjoyment of pornography, dirty talk and other sexual harassment -- and that senators would entertain such discussions. He said:
"This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."
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