This Thursday, at a Mobile Bay, Alabama luxury resort, Clarence Thomas wept about the unfairness of it all. Meanwhile, a pregnant teenager in Texas cried herself to sleep in abject terror over where her life was heading. But fuck her. Thomas is the victim here. It should surprise no one. Clarence is a prolific whiner and long-term conservative — but I repeat myself.
The New York Times had Abby VanSickle — who works the Supreme Court beat for the paper — at the event. She reported Thomas’s comments, starting with this:
“My wife and I, the last two or three years, just the nastiness and the lies,” said Justice Thomas, who did not specify what he was referring to in addressing a full ballroom of lawyers and judges gathered for a judicial conference in Alabama. “There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”
Every silver lining has a cloud when you are a professional victim. It blinds Thomas to the irony of saying he will not focus on the negativity in his life, by focusing on it during what was supposed to be a business affair. But the billionaires heard what they needed to — a man eager to salve his wounds with thirty pieces of silver.
The event was a judicial conference. This arrangement means some junior partners of important law firms lectured each other — while their principals tackled America’s excess shrimp and t-bone crisis with sharp knives and premium wines after the supply of Colonel E.H. Taylor ‘Cursed Oak’ Straight Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey ran low.
Clarence continued to not focus on the arrows of outrageous fortune by adding:
“You don’t get to prevent people from doing horrible things or saying horrible things. But one, you have to understand and accept the fact that they don’t, they can’t change you unless you permit that.”
He had more:
“Especially in Washington, people pride themselves in being awful. It’s a hideous place, as far as I’m concerned. Because the rest of the country, it’s one of the reasons we like R.V.-ing, you get to be around regular people who don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things, merely because they have the capacity to do it.”
Is Thomas implying he is an average Joe? How many regular people can rely on convenient rich ‘friends’ to finance luxury RV purchases?
In case the reader is unfamiliar, in 1999, Thomas accepted a ‘loan’ of $267,000 from ‘good friend Anthony “Tony” Welters to buy his recreational vehicle. After nine years of interest-only payments, Tony apparently forgave the loan — thus converting the cash into a gift/bribe. Which means, in addition to being beholden to Welters, Thomas owed taxes on it. Did he pay them? Only the IRS knows.
Worse, this conservative and master of projection — again, I repeat myself — is blind to the harmful things he has done merely because he has the capacity to do it.
It would have been laughable if this crybaby had stuck to kvetching. But he reduced the evening to farce by claiming his career on the federal bench was an unwelcome detour from his life’s true goal. Crabby Clarence claimed that before his appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit:
“I was thinking of getting out of D.C. I had no interest in being in public life.”
Just in case you missed the point, Thomas circled back to complain about his position on the Supreme Court:
“I wound up in this job, And this is, we pray, to do whatever it was that God wanted me to do, what I was being called to do. But being in public life is not something I would have chosen to do.”
Who had the gun to your head Clarence? Who forced you into public life? Hint: It was not God. But being a SCOTUS Justice, which is as close to God as an American can get, must have been attractive. There are few Americans in jobs with lifetime security. A job that has no annual review and where raises are not merit-based. A position with no boss to appease. Even the leader of the free world gets a maximum of eight years.
Not that Thomas sees it that way. He is so coddled in his position that he can indulge in ‘if only’.
“If I knew more about the court, I would have stayed on the D.C. Circuit,” he said, to some laughter from the audience. “But we don’t get to choose that. We’re called to do something and we do it. But I think that the — I really would have preferred, if I could be selfish, to be on the D.C. Circuit. I think this court is a bit tougher of a haul.”
It is like the trust fund baby claiming that their life would have been so much better if they had been born poor — as Thomas was. And that illuminates the pettiness of the man. He is the American dream. He has reached the mountain top.
At 75, he could have been a revered older statesman, a forceful mentor for disadvantaged youth, and proof that an American at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, working hard and given a timely assist with a dollop of luck, could climb the greasy poll.
But all Thomas can do is whine and lash out. This petulance is nothing new. His autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son is, in equal measures, a story of achievement against vanishingly long odds and a litany of grievances.
Thomas whines about everything, from his financial woes to the hostility he faced. Yes, he was a black man growing up in racist America. He had student loan debts and a low-paying job. And he found solace in a bottle. Welcome to the world, mate. It is not fair. But many others carrying the same weight have succeeded with grace. And few have received a $1.5 million advance to write their life story.
He complained that people would think he lacked the academic chops to go to Yale Law — that he only got in thanks to quotas. I am sure Thomas is right. But a big man would have proved them wrong by showing he deserved his schooling. Thomas proves his smallness by moaning about it.
A full third of the book is dedicated to his confirmation hearings — or, as he called it, “a high-tech lynching.” He was not a happy camper. Senate confirmation hearings, like everything else political, are often bloody affairs. How a nominee chooses to deal with that fact talks to their character. It is a test conservatives often fail (see Brett Kavanaugh).
I am not saying that every conservative is a whiner. But if you hear someone whining, the odds predict they are a right-winger. From “you don't have Nixon to kick around anymore” to Trump whenever he opens his mouth, conservatives are tough-talking, beta-males — while an increasing number of fragile Republican women add to the woe-is-me chorus.
If Americans want their politicians to have strong jaws and steel spines they should vote for Democrats. Picking liberals also ensures that young Americans will have the same opportunities Thomas did — even as he pulls up the ladder.