from the washington times:
An Alaskan lawyer has accused Supreme CourtJustice Clarence Thomas of groping her at a 1999 dinner party.
Moira Smith, the vice president and counsel at Enstar Natural Gas Co., told the National Law Journal in an article published Thursday that the conservative justice grabbed her behind several times at a party at the Virginia home of Louis Blair, the former head of the Truman Foundation.
“He groped me while I was setting the table, suggesting I should sit ‘right next to him,’” she alleged, the New York Daily News reported. “He was 5 or 6 inches down and he got a good handful and he kept squeezing me and pulling me close to him.”Ms. Smith, now 41, was 23 years old and a Truman scholar at the time. She first wrote about the alleged incident in a Facebook post on Oct. 7, the night The Washington Post published a leaked 2005 recording of Donald Trump boasting about groping women.
Justice Thomas has denied the allegations, issuing a statement through the Supreme Court’s press office, The Post reported.
“This claim is preposterous and it never happened,” he said.
This quote was in the Raw STory version, based on what she told the National Law Review (NLR is behind a paywall.)
“We now know that many men in power take advantage of vulnerable women. That willingness by men in power to take advantage of vulnerable women relies on an unspoken pact that the women will not speak up about it. Why? Because they are vulnerable. Because they are star-struck. Because they don’t want to be whiners. Because they worry about their career if they do speak out. But silence no longer feels defensible; it feels complicit.”
The last line is the best one.
Clarence Thomas is almost everything wrong with the ‘conservative’ personality in a nutshell: A veneer of prim, repressive Christian morality covering a swamp of gross, closeted creepiness, a permanent, resentful chip on his shoulder about all the ‘cheaters’ and the ‘takers’ – i.e. liberals – that make it hard for virtuous, hard-working Christian men like himself, and an unexamined, arrogant presumption that he and virtuous men like him have an intuitive grasp of What The Founders Intended, unlike blindly fashionable secular liberals. It’s all there. The whole big steaming shit-brick of a package. He also seems to have a personality marked by a neurotic self-loathing and internalization of abuse that started with the sadistic grandfather who raised him, and continued through his career. When he was unable to find a job after law school, he didn’t blame the white-owned law firms that refused to hire him. In his eyes, it was his own fault because he was black and therefore perceived, entirely understandably, to be an affirmative-action baby. He thus spent his entire professional career working for the government, which he disdains like all conservatives–only in his case, it was probably the “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me for a member” syndrome. I wonder how many other black conservatives have this kind of self-esteem problem?
P.J. O’Rourke is an asshole, but he had it right when he said:
“Self-loathing is one of those intuitive leaps that is almost always correct.”