Topic: Newsmax
Larry Bell started his July 11 Newsmax column by complaining:
Recently decrying the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and rebuking Justice Clarence Thomas for the “tragic error,” President Biden himself reversed his own 1982 position when he cast a Senate vote to do exactly the same — a Senate Judiciary Committee constitutional amendment proposal to allow individual states to determine abortion rights.
Biden’s harsh criticism of Justice Thomas bears witness to dramatic personal and career contrasts between the two men that warrant long-neglected public attention.
Bell then spent several paragraphs putting a positive spin on Thomas' life story. When he got to the part about Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against him, he served up more spin:
Senate hearings to confirm Thomas’s nomination were savagely disrupted by televised show trial allegations of African-American Anita Hill, his former special assistant in the U.S. Department of Education civil rights office, who accused him of sexual harassment.
Nevertheless, Hill had continued to contact Thomas voluntarily even after he helped arrange for her subsequent appointment as a law professor at the University of Oklahoma.
Denying any wrongdoing, Thomas emotionally characterized the televised ordeal as a "high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.”
Thomas added: “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.”
That sad Senate spectacle was chaired by Joe Biden who then said: "Sexual harassment is a serious matter and, in my view, any person guilty of this offense is unsuited to serve not only on the nation's highest court but any position of responsibility, of higher responsibility in or out of government.”
That justice standard clearly didn’t apply during the 2020 presidential election campaign when Tara Reade, a former staffer in Joe Biden's U.S. Senate office, alleged that he sexually assaulted her in 1993 in a Capitol Hill office.
Although Reade had previously filed her charges in a formal police report at the time of the alleged incident, mainstream media showed no interest in her claim whatsoever.
Bell glossed over a couple inconvenient facts here: 1) Hill's charges against Thomas were never proven false, and 2) Reade has a documented history of manipulative and deceitful behavior that made her account untrustworthy. And, needless to say, Bell said nothing about the controversy of his wife being such a right-wing political activist that it arguably jeopardizes any claim to judicial impartiality he might have.
In contrast with his loving account of Thomas' life, Bell served up a less-that-flattering account of Biden's life, and even then he struggled to find things to fill it out, like this: "In 2010, then-Sen. Biden eulogized his former Ku Klux Klan leader friend Sen. Robert Byrd whom he described as "fiercely devoted to his principles," a '"friend,' 'mentor' and a 'guide.'" Bell failed to mention that Byrd spent the final decades of his life renouncing his KKK association and becoming an advocate of civil rights, to the point that the NAACP positively eulogized Byrd after his death.
Bell concluded by whining: "Whereas Justice Thomas’s legal essays and written arguments supporting his opinions are clear, well researched, and consistent, Biden’s tele-prompted messaging follows and equivocates each most recent self-inflicted policy disaster. America has chosen both wisely and foolishly."
