Anita Hill’s New York Times Op-Ed riposte to the fusillade launched at her by Clarence Thomas in his new memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, is pure gold.

She doesn’t personally attack him. On the contrary, she’s amazingly cool and collected— especially given that she’s had to sit with the humiliation of the he-said/she-said sexual harassment pubic-hair-on-Coke-can senate hearings for seventeen years, watching him the whole time sitting pretty and ruling against desegregation and the like time and again.

Some bits:

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.

Regrettably, since 1991, I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In efforts to assail their accusers’ credibility, detractors routinely diminish people’s professional contributions. Often the accused is a supervisor, in a position to describe the complaining employee’s work as “mediocre” or the employee as incompetent. Those accused of inappropriate behavior also often portray the individuals who complain as bizarre caricatures of themselves — oversensitive, even fanatical, and often immoral — even though they enjoy good and productive working relationships with their colleagues.

Does any of that bring to mind the initial response to inquiries about the attorney general firings— where the people in power dropped all this hooey for public consumption about the incompetencies of the good people they wanted to kick to the curb?

Another interesting part of this story: the image that accompanied Hill’s Op-Ed was made by someone calling themselves “David Suter.” I have to ask in light of the recent publication of The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin’s book on the Supreme Court, whether “David Suter” is actually an “artist name” for Clarence Thomas’s tortured colleague liberal Justice David Souter, who probably doodled the image this year while listening to Thomas recite his crazy-right opinions…

In a sort-of review of Toobin’s book, two wags at the Examiner in Denver quote Toobin to say that after the Bush v Gore decision, which put Bush in office, “David Souter alone among the justices was shattered, at times weeping when he thought of the case. For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice… That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same.”

What may have pulled up poor shatterd David Souter was submitting his Supreme Court doodles for publication under the name David Suter!

Tags: anita hill, clarence thomas, my grandfathers son, new york times