Beyond the seemingly obvious point that Thomas committed perjury to gain his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, there is also the ugliness of how the Republicans and the Right sought to victimize the women who already had been victims of Thomas’s predatory behavior. To accomplish that, an early form of the modern right-wing news media swung into action.
Though still in its pre-Fox News days, the right-wing media used its print outlets and its presence on TV and radio chat shows to demonize Hill and the others.
David Brock, then an aspiring right-wing hatchet man at The American Spectator, struck it rich by smearing Hill with the infamous description of her as “a little bit slutty and a little bit nutty.” He followed that up with a full-length assault in a best-selling book entitled The Real Anita Hill, which further denounced Hill and defended Thomas.
Brock skyrocketed to fame and fortune as the exemplar of conservative investigative journalism. However, Brock’s career path was complicated by the fact that he was gay and that the “family values” conservative movement viewed homosexuality as a sin and a perversion.
Though Brock continued as a well-paid right-wing spear-carrier into the Clinton administration, starting the spread of sexual innuendo against Bill and Hillary Clinton that would culminate in the impeachment crisis in 1998-99, Brock gradually rebelled against his personal hypocrisy.
In 2002, after his right-wing propaganda had inflicted grievous damage on individuals and the nation, Brock recanted. In a new book, Blinded by the Right, he admitted that he had defamed a number of his targets, including Anita Hill and the Clintons.
Brock also described the inner workings of the campaign to destroy Hill. Brock wrote that the propaganda operation was aided and abetted by President George H.W. Bush’s White House and right-wing federal judges.
For instance, Brock wrote that he received support and encouragement from U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman and Silberman’s wife, Ricky. Even after Thomas had won Senate confirmation, Silberman still was pushing attack lines against Hill, Brock wrote.
After Bush-41’s White House slipped Brock a psychiatric opinion claiming that Hill suffered from “erotomania,” Silberman met with Brock to suggest even more colorful criticism of Hill.
“Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian ‘acting out’,” Brock wrote. “Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would never have asked Hill for dates: She had bad breath.”
In 1993, after Brock published his book-length assault on Hill, the Silbermans and other prominent conservatives joined a celebration at the Embassy Row Ritz-Carlton, Brock wrote, noting that also in attendance was Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle, whom Chief Justice William Rehnquist had put in charge of picking special prosecutors to investigate the Clinton administration. [For more on Silberman and Sentelle, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
These right-wing operatives – masquerading as jurists and journalists – had no regard for what was fair or true. They were committed to gaining or holding power for their ideological and personal benefit and doing so by whatever means were necessary.
…America’s decoupling from reality – and its disappearance into the swamp of unreality – began in earnest with the rise of actor and ad pitchman Ronald Reagan, who crafted a host of get-something-for-nothing policies that appealed to a nation that was struggling to adjust to a more complex world. Reagan promised that tax cuts tilted to the rich would generate more revenue and eliminate the federal debt; that this money also could finance a massive military buildup which would frighten America’s enemies and restore national prestige; that freeing corporations from government regulations and from powerful unions would herald a new day of prosperity; that the country could turn its back on alternative energy and simply drill for more oil; that whites no longer had to feel guilty about the plight of blacks; that traditional “values” – i.e. rejection of the “counter-culture” – would bring back the good old days when men were men and women were women. Robert Parry ☀
Official Washington – both in media and politics – will become even more deaf to the needs of average Americans. After all, a corollary to Eisenhower’s “military-industrial-complex” warning could be Upton Sinclair’s old truism that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Robert Parry ☀
Yet, when an election occurs in another country and an “unpopular” leader appears to win, an opposite set of rules apply. Anyone who doesn’t immediately accept the assumption of voter fraud is naïve; every “conspiracy theory” is cited respectfully while contrary evidence is downplayed or ignored, for instance the assumption about the Azeri vote that Ballen and Doherty debunked with their poll findings. Another irony is that Iran’s religious leaders now have ordered an investigation of the fraud allegations in a country not known for its democratic institutions. That is more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004. Robert Parry ☀
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