Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the "mob" of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life.
"Desecrated"? Clarence Thomas' life is sacred? Now he thinks he's Jesus? And here I thought Rudy Giuliani was Jesus.
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In the book, Thomas writes that Hill was the tool of liberal activist groups "obsessed" with abortion and outraged because he did not fit their idea of what an African American should believe.
"The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns," Thomas writes of his hearings. "Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America's newspapers. . . . But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose -- to keep the black man in his place -- was unchanged."
Thomas, 59, says in the foreword to the book, due to go on sale Monday, that he wrote it to "leave behind an accurate record of my own life as I remember it" rather than leave it to those "with careless hands or malicious hearts." He indicates he wrote it himself, with editing help from three others.
I guess that means those evil book editors of the Liberal Elite™.
Throughout the book, Thomas describes himself as under siege -- variously from preening elites, light-skinned African Americans and critics who object to his conservative politics. Feeling under duress from civil rights leaders, and despondent over reports he was reading about the poor achievement of African American students in high school, Thomas writes that he simply sat at his desk at the Department of Education one evening and wept.
After the death of his grandfather and grandmother in 1983 and with his first marriage on the rocks, Thomas says he had a fleeting thought of suicide. "I'd actually reached the point where I wondered whether there was any reason for me to go on," he writes. "The mad thought of taking my own life fleetingly crossed my mind. Of course, I didn't consider it seriously, if only because I knew I couldn't abandon [my son] Jamal as I had been abandoned by C," which is how he refers to his father, M.C. Thomas.
There are drugs and therapy for this kind of depression and paranoia, you know.
"As a child in the Deep South, I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along," he writes. "My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony."
Drama queen much?
Thomas has been a sharp critic of affirmative action and the use of racial classifications in schools, but he acknowledges in the book that he was admitted to Yale Law School in 1971 partly because he was black. "I'd graduated from one of America's top law schools -- but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value."
But that didn't bother you enough to turn down the admission, now, did you? That's a lot of time and effort spent to earn a degree that you think has no value.
But by the time he was confirmed, he said, the prize meant little. Instead of watching the Senate roll call, he drew himself a bath. His wife came to tell him he had been confirmed 52 to 48.
"Whoop-dee-damn-doo," Thomas writes.
Then step down. Now. Do us a favor. Because someone holding onto that extreme a level of anger has no business in the Judiciary.
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