Joe Biden Owes An Apology

Joe Biden Stage-Managed the Entire “High-Tech Lynching” of Clarence Thomas; now the Left Wants Him to Apologize to His Star Actress, Anita Hill.

I’ve been confused about calls on the Left for Joe Biden to apologize to Anita Hill. I remember the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings and thought that if Biden should apologize to anyone it was to the Supreme Court Justice. However, after reading this piece in The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway I’m reassessing. I’m not so sure he doesn’t owe her one.

Here’s what I mean: Last week on “The View,” the cast of magpies known as the hosts had the former Vice President on the ropes ‘hummana-hummana-ing’ over why he should apologize to Hill and for groping women and girls. This would be his proving ground for being taken seriously as a 2020 presidential candidate. Biden said he had spoken with Hill and offered an apology, his penance, in hopes it would mollify the hosts. He assured the women that, “I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas.” Remember now that Anita Hill’s dubious testimony of pubic hairs on Coke cans, x-rated videos and the like was such an obvious put-up job, so clearly and obviously orchestrated for maximum impact by Democrats that even a young, wet-behind-the-ears, liberal dummy like me could see it.

Hemingway cites Arlen Specter’s memoir for his recollections of Hill’s testimony at the hearing. Biden told Specter that it was obvious Hill was lying. Specter, at the time a Republican who later switched teams, was a former prosecutor and member of the Judiciary Committee: “[I]n 1998, Biden admitted to Specter that ‘It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying’ about a key part of her testimony. The exchange was published in Specter’s 2000 memoir, ‘Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.’” Hemingway recounted Specter’s questioning of Hill about a USA Today article outlining the deal Hill had struck with the Senate Democrats to detonate her charge of sexual harassment and watch the political fallout in anonymity, which Democrats predicted would include Thomas dropping out of Supreme Court consideration. Hill so clearly lied about this fact and dissembled on so many other claims that day that Biden recessed the hearing early and dispatched his staff to “refresh” her “recollection.”

“After this exchange Biden recessed the committee. Biden told me in November 1998, ‘It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying. At that point I truncated the hearing and recessed it early for lunch,’ Biden said. ‘I turned to my chief of staff and said: Go down and tell her lawyers that if her recollection is not refreshed by the time she gets back, I will be compelled to pursue the same line of questioning the Senator [Specter] did. Because it seems to me, she did what he said.’ Biden, as the committee’s chairman and top Democrat, would have carried great sway if he had suggested publicly that Hill was lying when she repeatedly answered questions about Thomas’s potential withdrawal by saying she didn’t remember.”

Arlen Specter

Fast forward to 2017 during the heyday of the pink capped #MeToo movement and a recorded interview with Biden by Glamour Magazine. Biden, watching the male me-too body count grow on the cultural battlefield, told his live audience that he did his best to help Hill. Biden told Glamour that he and his staff interceded to stop testimony of another witness because, as he put it in classic understatement, “The truth of the matter was you don’t want a witness to come testify and be weak in the testimony and undercut the testimony of Anita Hill.” “Weak” as in lying like a rug. She was one of four witnesses whose testimony was, ahem, suspect as Hemingway reports. Biden says the woman wanted her charges – not her identity – to go public, but oddly pressed her for an affidavit claiming she “refused to testify.”

The record shows that Biden, with Senators Howard Metzenbaum, (D. Ohio) and Ted Kennedy (D. Mass), stage managed, if not scripted, all the bogus testimony. In his closing remarks, Thomas “uncategorically” and “unequivocally” denied Hill’s claims. Then, barely pausing, grabbed up his strop, sharpened his rhetorical Bench Made and pointed it at the perfidious stage managers in a speech for the ages. Here’s a partial transcript:

“I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation… The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this. This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a ‘high-tech lynching’ for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. — U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”

Clarence Thomas

So obvious was the Democrats’ stagecraft that in my imagination I could see someone someday poking around the attic of an old Georgetown brownstone, finding a mildewed clump of bound papers and blowing off the dust to reveal the words, “Clarence Thomas Hearings, Act 1, Scene 2, Anita Hill Testimony.” Indeed, the Thomas hearings, which held news junkies like me spellbound, boomeranged so badly on the Left that they haven’t stopped lying about it. They’ve even produced movies about it, in an attempt to recast Hill as a truth-telling Wonder Woman instead of a cipher for the Left. After Biden apologizes to Clarence Thomas and the nation, he owes one more apology: he should go back to Hill and do another mea culpa for failing to protect her from herself. Seeing that televised Rodney-King-style political beat down of a black man on live TV all those years ago shook me to my core. There may be millions of people who watched the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in September and had the same experience. But have no fear, the Left is likely already pitching Hollywood to produce “Christine Blasey Ford, the Musical!” They’re probably rewriting the history as we speak.

Victoria Taft is a broadcaster, writer, audiobook producer, and contributor to “The Daily Ledger” on the One America News Network. Contact her at VictoriaTaft.com