SCOTUS Wife Virginia Thomas asks Anita Hill to apologize - WTF?

If if if if if if …

The only reason to assume that Anita Hill’s testimony was “made them up out of whole cloth, in an effort to derail Thomas’ nomination, without caring what effect her lies might have on Thomas personally, or on Thomas’ family,” is because you want to believe it. If she lied, she should have been charged with perjury instead of receiving a demand for an apology 20 years after the fact by Thomas’s wife.

Chrissakes, if assumptions are the criteria we need to judge this story, why don’t we just assume Anita Hill eats babies and be done with it.

Assuming that somebody told a big lie 20 years ago in front of a national audience and during a legal proceeding - Why in the world would anybody believe that the person would want to say ANYTHING contrary to their original position?

I gotta score it “Tone Deaf”

Mrs. Thomas didn’t extend an olive branch.

She requested that Ms. Hill do so.

Because she is not offering any goodwill in exchange. No compromise is offered. No peacemaking is being extended. She called to demand an explanation and apology. That in and of itself is not an olive branch.

Again let me draw your attention to the fact that the OP’s commentary is predicated on “…regardless of politics or one’s personal beliefs about that past event…”

If your position is, “Look, I know what happened, and I’m not changing my opinion of what happened,” that’s fine, but you can hardly claim your position is held REGARDLESS of politics or your personal beliefs about that past event, can you?

Again, because Ms Thomas has zero, nada, zip, zilch reason to assume (aside from her own personal prejudice in favor of her husband) that Ms Hill did any such thing, and therefore is putting out a shot in the dark which is extremely tone deaf. I mean, if my auntie had a dick she’d be my uncle, but if I’ve never seen her with her pants off I have no call to leave her a voice mail message demanding she admit that she’s got the dangler she’s always maintained she doesn’t have. My auntie would consider me to be rude at best and delusional at average if I were to do so, and she’d be absolutely right to think it.

What is being offered? An opportunity to ruin my career by admitting I deliberately fabricated testimony to the Senate in an effort to destroy someone’s chance to join the Supreme Court?

There’s nothing wrong with asking for an apology, but there’s really nothing being offered, so there’s no conceivable reason Hill would admit anything.

No, I still think the lady is a nutjob even if Anita Hill IS a big lying liar from Liarville. The event in question is twenty years in the past, and calling and demanding a public apology now just makes her look insane. I get that having your husband lied about in public would be upsetting. Asking for a public apology at the time would seem like a reasonable thing. But out of the blue, 20 years later? It looks crazy. There is no context in which this does not look crazy. It makes her look like she has been spending her days and nights silently, quietly fuming, and plotting how best to make this Anita Hill person pay, damn it, PAY!, and finally couldn’t take it anymore and picked up the phone. It seems like something a stalker would do, not the wife of one of the highest public officials in the country.

I’m guessing that maybe the Thomases were having an argument, somehow Anita Hill’s name came up, accusations flew, the argument escalated, Clarence insisted he didn’t do anything wrong, and in an attempt to settle the matter once and for all (and to sort of prove to herself that she really does believe that her husband isn’t the sexual harasser that the evil MSM makes him out to be) Ginny called Hill and asked for the apology.

Here is the message she left:

That doesn’t strike me as a demand, but a request.

Why do you say that’s not an olive branch? Is there some essential element of olive branchiness that it’s missing?

Again let me draw your attention to the fact that the OP’s commentary is predicated on “…regardless of politics or one’s personal beliefs about that past event…” Did you miss that part?

If your position is, “Look, I know what happened, and I’m not changing my opinion of what happened,” that’s fine, but you can hardly claim your position is held REGARDLESS of politics or your personal beliefs about that past event, can you?

I opened the thread just now to post pretty much this theory.

No, she wouldn’t.

Because in fact she has the dick, in this hypothetical.

Why? It pretty much came out to be a He said - She said issue. All I got out of it was that it was a stalemate. No strong evidence either way and pretty much a mud slinging contest.

One of them was obviously lying. Yet no charges were filed.

She may have to pass the salt to Clarence so he can season up his bowl of blind kittens.

I agree. First, because whatever one thinks of Thomas’ jurisprudence (and I think he’s way, way out to lunch) - the man is a Justice on the United States Supreme Court, extremely intelligent, a fine legal writer, and he is very much not Scalia Jr. He and Scalia often vote together, yes - but they come to their conclusions from very different places.

Second - I’m really, really trying not to see a racist subtext to that post. And, well, I’m not pulling it off. What’s wrong with you?

villa, thank you. You are, so far as I can tell, the one person in this thread to this point with a reading comprehension past, say, sixth grade. I appreciate you more every day.

ETA: No offense to Bubbadog, whose post wasn’t there when I started typing.

Agreed, on both counts.

Again, why do you consider it reasonable to make that assumption and not the contrary one? :dubious:

The rest of us do all know, actually.

Totally. Carrying golf clubs is what law clerks are for.

Because this is the assumption that Ms. Thomas probably holds - and so if we want to understand her behavior, it’s logical to start from that premise. That doesn’t mean the premise is true - but it’s not silly to ask “is Ms. Thomas’ behavior reasonable if she holds this belief?”

That being said - as has been established, one could go either way in answering that question.