A better analogy would be if a friend of Mitchell called Elizabeth Smart and asked her to admit
she wasn’t kidnapped and had run off with the Mitchells on her own accord.
Googling commencing…
Googling complete. Ricci looks like a victim of snap judgement. I’m not sure his death was the result of “hounding” and since I’m unclear on how the Elizabeth Smart case is analogous to Anita Hill, I’m less clear on how a peripheral player in Smart’s case is, either.
All of a sudden you are sensitive? Everything I read says Thomas is the worst Supreme Court judge ever. He never asks a question of the lawyers presenting a case. He must lack the balls to speak in public and show his incompetence. He votes with Scalia and is a die hard right winger who sides with the powerful . He has little sympathy for the downtrodden and sucks up to the powerful. The Roberts Court is an extension of the right wing power structure and Thomas, a black man , is one of the worst.
Ok, I read through six motherfucking pages (of course, three of those pages were just **Bricker **cutting and pasting ‘regardless of politics or one’s personal beliefs about that past event’, though he seems to have finally dismissed that demon after allowing a couple of retractions/restatements for his ownself) of this thread to ask:
Why the fuck is this in the pit?
If 40% is the vast majority (24% believed Hill), then I guess so. Remember that sexual harassment was a pretty new concept to most people prior to this, as most people thought it was just the way things are in a workplace. One year later, after the public was more educated on the topic, the poll numbers flipped, with 44% believing Hill to only 34% for Thomas.
Still want to rely on the polls?
It probably also helped Thomas in the initial polls that Hill testified during the afternoon while he got to deliver his closing statement in prime time and thus to a larger audience.
Lucky break, huh? Funny how shit like that happens. Must be that liberal media again.
So we can scream "DAMN! SHIT! BITCH! DOOKIE!
Does this mean we can start a high-tech lynching now?
There was a well-known Virginia Hill. She was Bugsy Siegel’s girlfriend. Annette Bening played her in the movie Bugsy.
She also delilvered the drugs Bobby Kennedy used to silence Marilyn Manson.
I suspect you may have misinterpreted the OP. The OP wasn’t actually about the phrase “tone deaf” as much as it was about how shocking it was for the Ginni Thomas to call Anita Hill out of the blue, 20 years later, asking Ms. Hill for an apology, and then characterizing her actions as ‘extending an olive branch.’" It’s okay if you can’t fully understand nuances of the English language.
Almost 20 years ago, Anita Hill was subpoenaed to testify, and she gave her testimony. At the time, Mr. Thomas gave an interview saying that there was a large conspiracy to derail his nomination. Then he won – that is, he was confirmed. In the almost 20 years since then,
[ol]
[li]Anita Hill has returned to her private life, except for the death threats.[/li][li]Anita Hill has not intimated in any way that she might change her story.[/li][li]Clarence Thomas has not indicated in any way that he might change his story.[/li][li]No one has investigated the conspirators that Thomas claimed were behind Hill’s testimony.[/li][/ol]
From that, I would not say her voice mail was “tone deaf,” I’d say her voice mail was insulting, spiteful, hateful, bizarre and delusional. Again, the game was over in 1991, and Clarence Thomas won. Why bring it up now, and describe her action as “offering an olive branch” when she was really asking for an apology from Hill?
Hell, the story of the $550,000 funnelled anonymously the wife of a Supreme Court justice through her Liberty Central advocacy group last year has pretty much died down. So Ginni won. As did her husband. Why stir things up? Whether tone deaf or not, I’d suspect that the last thing Ginni would want to do is to have any reporters poking their noses around the Thomases. Again, I’d not describe this as tone deaf, I’d describe it as the actions of someone who’s a bit addled.
So, actually, WordMan, WTF are you using the phrase “tone deaf” for? Now I’m with Bricker; you should have used, “spiteful,” “hateful,” “deranged,” “insulting” and/or “bitter.”
It does seem strange that Virginia Thomas would choose to re-raise this issue. As this thread indicates, there are plenty of people who now remember only the spinned version of what happened. Bringing it back into the public forum will cause a review of the actual history and show how substantial Hill’s accusations were.
The result of this is a lot of people are going to end up seeing Clarence Thomas as somebody who was guilty but got away with it due to powerful connections. And thos connections are going to be shown to be the kinds of people who will help flout the law. I’m sure they would have rather let this sleeping dog lie.
Now as some people have pointed out, it’s not like Virginia Thomas called a press conference. She made a phone call which she presumedly hoped to keep quiet. But she left a recorded message at a place she had no reason to think would help preserve her secrecy. She had to realize there was a good chance this message would go public.
What is he doing with that ugly white woman? Clarence doesn’t like black ckicks?
We all understand what you’re saying. Further we understand the political point scoring motivation behind your obfuscatory games playing.
We in the real world aren’t playing that game though so quit trying to derail the thread for partisan purposes.
No it does not. No such assumption can be derived from the phrase.
I go away and come back to this? I am somehow responsible for the hair-splitting, can-Superman-tear-his-own-head-off? reductio ad absurdum, let’s-drift-into-the-Smart-case-and-engage-Dio (oh no!) prattling that **Bricker **and others have put forth? Because I didn’t concede a silly point? Boy, do I feel ashamed. :rolleyes:
So - wait: am I a bad guy or are you being sarcastic and pointing out that, IYHO, I let Ms. Thomas off too easy? For my part, specifically to try to minimize the likelihood of political snipping, I tried to focus on the basic human act, and yeah, I found it surprising, and surprising that she felt it was reasonable, not offensive, etc.
I put this in the Pit because I figured someone would use this as a launching point on the Tea Party, like the 2nd post did. While I suspect there is an element of her actions related to riling her Tea Party base, I am less inclined to use that to say “Tea Party = bad” as I am to say “jeez, what a stupid tactic,” but I assumed others may want to judge them more harshly.
What I didn’t expect was this “yeah, but what if we crossed the International Date Line?? How about that?? And on alternate Tuesdays, what if Elizabeth Smart apologized to Virginia Thomas - hmm??” silliness - and now this is the longest thread I’ve ever started. Hey - thanks guys! :p:rolleyes::smack:
- Virginia Thomas has been around the block politically; she knew what she was doing
- While it riled her political base for her, because the very nature of the call was so plainly tone deaf, regardless of what **Bricker **thinks (and yes, you can ratchet that up to “insulting” if you want to, groo ;)) - the overall “optics” on the Call to Apologize leave her looking worse to the general public, both on a personal level about what happened and on a political level.
So, yeah, the action left me scratching my head.
Leave Elizabeth Smart out of this, please.
I can buy, and at least one other poster has raised the same point, that this particular issue nags at Virginia Thomas and she’s under the impression that everything will be so much better if the truth (as she believes it must be) just came out and Anita Hill just admitted she was (as Virginia believes she must be) a liar. I think it’s an understandable view, if an overly emotional and irrational one. Heck, we’ve got numerous posters here who can’t let an issue go, even issues that don’t affect them nearly as personally as this affects Virginia.
I don’t get why the confidentiality or non-confidentiality of the call matters - certainly the desired apology would have to be public and Virginia’s prompting would have no chance of being kept secret. Heck, Virginia may well have had fantasies of herself being lauded for her part in bringing the liar Hill to Jesus, or something. I expect the call itself was the religious equivalent of drunk-dialing, though, something Virginia had been thinking about, impulsively did and now regrets.
I’m a little unclear on Bricker’s leap, too. I’d’ve taken a “regardless of politics” condition to be something like: “If you’re naturally inclined to dislike Clarence Thomas because of his politics, then assume he was a liberal, appointed by a Democrat, who faced the exact same accusations from Hill and go from there,” i.e. try to remove any personal bias the respondent might have against Thomas or for Hill based on politics alone. What I don’t see is why it should be assumed Hill was lying. Bricker says we are “entitled” to make that assumption. I guess we’re also entitled to assume Hill is an alien succubus, but I’m not clear on how either assumption contributes anything to the discussion.
You assume that because you’re evaluating the behavior of someone who clearly believes Hill was lying. The assumption is for the purposes of that evaluation, and nothing more.
If you assume Hill was lying, there’s nothing deranged or hateful or even inappropriate in the spouse requesting an apology. It may be ill advised, it may be tone deaf to describe it as an olive branch, but it’s not a ridiculous thought to request an apology.
Wrong - because even if YOU feel in your heart that an apology is required, you still should understand that the other person does NOT feel that way and gives NO indication of EVER feeling that way, so it is wrong-headed and tone-deaf and, yes, insulting to act on your impulse, regardless of your belief in it…unless you can rile your base. 