Koch conquers PBS?

We watched the brief Clarence Thomas bio "Created Equal" on PBS last night.  Neither of us could figure out why PBS would run such a thing, unless the Koch money included in the credits actually had some effect, which is hard to imagine.

It wasn't the hack job I expected.  The questions were sometimes mildly probing, but never in true "gotcha" territory.  Justice Thomas was allowed to explain clearly and repeatedly how his judicial philosophy works, and to express his disgust at the idea that any political movement has the right to tell him what views a black man is required to hold.  Anita Hill was treated briefly and respectfully, but Thomas's response got even more time and respect.  If it hadn't been PBS, I'd have assumed I was watching a serious journalism outlet.

When Thomas graduated from Yale Law School in the mid-1970s, a committed Democrat, he snagged only one job offer, from then Missouri AG John Danforth, a Republican.  Thomas's politics already had undergone a fundamental shakeup after a Marxist youth, but clearly the contact with a lot of thoughtful conservatives had a further impact.  Within no more than a decade, many law firms with a strong progressive bent would be falling all over themselves to snag black Yale graduates, but they sure missed their chance with Thomas.  Danforth, later a U.S. Senator, became a strong lifetime supporter and friend who sat next to Thomas in the grisly confirmation hearings.

Joe Biden presided over the travesty.  He came off as an incomprehensible boob, though more cogent and fluent than he could appear today.

12 comments:

Gringo said...

IIRC, Thomas graduated 8th in his class at Holy Cross, a school that has long been one of the more select in admissions. It ain't Bunker Hill Community College. As such, he had reason to initially believe that his admission to Yale was about his personal qualities and achievements.

Gringo said...

There would be an easy way to figure out to which degree Clarence Thomas was an AA admit to Yale: class rank at Yale. From what I have read, AA admits to law school tend to cluster in the lower 10% of class rank.

Gringo said...

There is an article on Clarence Thomas's time at Yale Law, but available only through JSTOR- not at the JBHE site.

Clarence Thomas: The Law School Years
Andrew Peyton Thomas
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
No. 35 (Spring, 2002), pp. 106-114

Grim said...

Biden looks bad in retrospect. Of course, any politician with nearly 50 years' service is going to look more out of step the further back you go. Still, that's only 30 years back, and it looks very bad.

Texan99 said...

I didn't mean to suggest that Thomas was an AA admission to Yale. It's possible that's what prospective employers assumed at the time, or just that law firms were awful about giving any serious consideration to black candidates at that time, even those with Yale degrees. (Sandra Day O'Connor was said to have faced similar problems, which now seem quaint.) A decade later that really had ceased to be a problem; law firms not only had gotten over their reluctance but badly, badly wanted to show that they had done so. There weren't enough black Ivy League job applicants to go around, by a long shot. There still aren't.

Or maybe back then employers were scared off by his Marxist semi-violent dabbling in youth, or the whole thing was much more dependent on being part of the club and knowing someone who knew someone. Whatever the problem was, a lot of employers missed a chance at a fine applicant. They used to warn us on the recruiting committee not to overlook excellent candidates because they didn't look enough like us--not just in terms of race, but clubs, hobbies, all that kind of thing. We needed these people to win cases in court, not go on a date with us.

Anyway, Danforth showed foresight and an unossified way of thinking when he snagged Thomas for his AG staff.

Texan99 said...

Re Biden: It wasn't so much that his performance hasn't withstood the test of time and changing sexual mores, it's that he was incomprehensible. There was a strange nod-nod-wink-wink thing he indulged in for quite a while that Thomas found completely baffling. It had something to do with using "natural law" as a dog whistle, presumably for crypto-anti-abortion views, I think. Biden kept grinning a repeating "You and I both know what we're talking about," and Thomas just sort of stared at him. Thomas was deeply involved in originalist thinking, but perhaps not that hung up on abortion policy. It infuriated the committee that he wouldn't admit to have debated the abortion question with anyone. I think they genuinely believed (and perhaps still do) that the only reason to be interested in Constitutional originalism, federalism, or limited government was to deprive women of control over their reproductive functions.

E Hines said...

incomprehensible boob

My wife and I watched that program, too. I'd add to that description sneering, which was the nature of those "smiles" after he'd asked his leading questions, not only his idiotic "natural law" questions (which struck me as demonstrating his utter lack of understanding of "natural law," either as articulated in those days or by folks like Locke).

Eric Hines

Ymar Sakar said...

Gringo collects lots of sources, good stuff, as expected. Mensa is probably his minimum not max.

Aggie said...

I watched it and taped it to watch again, too. I thought it was pretty well done and even-handed, refreshing. It will make me re-think my annual donation to our local PBS outlet, and I will also emphasize the 'why' of it to them.

Watching Joe sitting next to Ted Kennedy for those hearing brings back all of the reasons that nobody ever has had cause to take Joe seriously, or pay much attention to him at all. Teddy was the archetypal FatKat, greasy to the gills in every motivation, the least talented of all the Kennedys and the most willing to exploit the name.

Next to him, Joe comes across as what he is - an unserious buffoon, tolerated by the party, useful at times, capable of low-grade corruption, able to follow instructions, but without the imagination for the big leagues. The party has fallen a long ways to be putting something like Joe forward, in his present condition.

Gringo said...

Texan99
I didn't mean to suggest that Thomas was an AA admission to Yale.
I was thinking of what I recall Thomas saying about his years at Yale and trying to get a job after graduation, and to the reaction of our "liberal" friends to his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Gringo said...

Regarding affirmative action and Yale Law, there was a letter that a Yale Law alum wrote in 1969 that touched on the issue. If Clarence Thomas felt as if he were walking between hidden land mines during his time at Yale, he had reason. Duck Duck go:1969 letter about affirmative action admits to yale law.

J Melcher said...

NPR experts agree with Donald Trump (anything that follows this lede is disproportionately less newsworthy) that

... there is slightly more fraud in mail-voting than in-person voting. But they caution that both can be done safely and securely, and that election fraud is extremely rare in all instances.

"Where there is fraud in the system, it really seems to be in mail balloting," said Lonna Atkeson, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. "There's some, there's not a lot. I think there's a little bit."

...
Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is proposing that mail-in-ballot to be sent to every registered voter in the country.


https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/07/829323152/fact-check-is-mail-ballot-fraud-as-rampant-as-president-trump-says-it-is


Our innumerate press corps seems unable to grasp the very basic problem that at present only a few percent of voters use mail ballots. And even so, the slow, expensive, and labor intensive means of validating those ballots still leaves a few percent of them to be fraudulently counted. IF the share of ballots sent by mail increases significantly, the manual processes can't help but break down, and so the percent of frauds among those ballots will rise. Although it may be possible, desirable, and (very unlikely but perhaps) affordable to implement new secure procedures to mechanize, accelerate, and better control mail ballot validations, it is certainly NOT possible to implement such improvements before the November 2020 elections.