Biden led pack in ‘high-tech lynching’ of Clarence Thomas
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The saying goes, “Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”
By that standard, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, the Democrat’s vice presidential pick, should be getting really good by now.
The problem is, he doesn’t seem to be learning.
It is more than odd to this writer that Barack Obama, in his quest to become America’s first African-American president, would choose as his running mate the one senator most associated with what has gone into the language as the infamous attempted “high-tech lynching” of the black man who went on to become Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States.
To get himself entangled in such a despicable effort to smear Thomas and keep him from becoming only the second black person in history to sit on the court (Thurgood Marshall was the first), Biden showed a serious failure of moral judgment.
It was precisely the rotten judgment that one generally does not associate with decent governance – going full bore with such determination on a misbegotten crusade.
Biden’s lapses were evident early. He was called out by fellow Democrat opponent Michael Dukakis in his 1988 presidential bid for plagiarizing other scholars in law school and later for lifting the words of other politicians. The most publicized incident involved stealing word for word a speech given by then-British Labor Party leader, Neil Kinnock. That bit of plagiarism, when revealed by the Dukakis campaign, caused Biden to withdraw from the 1988 presidential race.
Of graver consequence to America, author Peter Wehner, writing this month in the Wall Street Journal, listed some of Biden’s major failings of political judgment:
Wehner wrote, “In decade after decade and on important issue after important issue, Mr. Biden’s judgment has been deeply flawed.”
In the 1970s, Biden opposed giving aid to the South Vietnamese government in its war against the North, helping set up Congress’ cut-off of funds to our ally. Vietnam soon fell to the communists and a million of our former South Vietnamese friends were slaughtered. Others fled to America as “boat people.”
In the 1980s, Biden was a leading Democrat for cutting off aid to Nicaraguan freedom fighters and to another group that President Ronald Reagan was trying to help, the pro-American government in El Salvador, locked at the time in a bitter struggle with the Soviet-sponsored Marxists calling themselves the FMLN.
Biden has “consistently opposed modernization of our strategic nuclear forces” and “was a fierce opponent of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” Wehner said.
The SDI program was once described by Biden as constituting “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.” Since, however, it is acclaimed as a main cause for the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Biden voted against the successful first Gulf War led by then-President George H.W. Bush. In 2003, he voted to authorize the war effort led by President George W. Bush to topple Saddam Hussein, going on the record with warnings about Saddam’s nuclear dangers. Still later, he shifted and opposed the war.
Possibly his worst blunder involving Iraq has gone down as the Biden Proposal to partition Iraq into three countries – much to the horror of our side, but more to the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds who would have been most affected.
Like Obama, Biden opposed President Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, calling it a “tragic mistake.”
His attempt in 1991 to destroy Clarence Thomas and his judicial nomination to the Supreme Court came in the Democrat-dominated Judiciary Committee, scene of an earlier bullying and rejection of another respected nominee, Robert Bork.
As a ranking member of the committee, Biden did all in his power to ruin Thomas, enroute to trying to keep him off the court.
As a memory refresher to some or to benefit younger readers whose American history education omitted the Thomas nomination hearings, here are some facts:
Thomas, like Obama, was raised by grandparents. But unlike Obama, his upbringing in rural Georgia was dirt poor. No elite prep school. No rich sponsors. No big city (Chicago) machine politicians to grease the way.
Thomas graduated with honors from Holy Cross University and from Yale Law School. By the time of his selection by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, he had served with distinction in as a federal appellate judge and earlier in state and federal government administrative posts, including serving as then-Gov. John Danforth’s assistant attorney general in Missouri.
Thomas’ offense before the Senate Democrats was that he was conservative and Republican.
To keep him from Thurgood Marshall’s mantle, Biden was joined most conspicuously by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Patrick Leahy. The Democrat dominated committee found a black woman who had worked with Thomas in government to testify about alleged sexual comments. Nothing physical. No threats about barring career advancement. No “I’ll do this if you do that.” Hardly the stuff to bar anyone, black or white, from serving on the court.
Finally, after prying the decision away from Biden and Co., the full Senate, with some Democrat votes, confirmed Justice Thomas 52-48.
A major irony was that Biden’s witness continued working for Thomas after the alleged indiscretions and even followed Thomas to a new post in another state. (Readers can Google Clarence Thomas and/or “high-tech lynching” or read his book to fill in the story.)
Racism was involved in that the committee by virtue of Biden and Co. followed a game plan that since the 1970s had become the standard approach applied by some considerable number of Democrat politicians to virtually all non-Democrat Party African-Americans nominees testifying before their committees.
It was the “racism” practiced against a distinguished black man who had lifted himself out of poverty to the position of being arguably the most important member of his race in America up to this time, given the court’s power to influence public policy.
The practitioners, interestingly enough, were a group of East Coast liberal elites as represented by Biden, Kennedy and Leahy.
Thomas, by the way, is special to many Nebraskans. He married an Omaha woman, the former Virginia (Ginni) Lamp, in a local church in 1985. He is a well-publicized Husker fan.
Sept. 2008
