What do O. J. Simpson and Clarence Thomas have in common? According to two prominent commentators, far more than I thought.
Thanks to James Taranto’s “Best Of The Web,” we find that the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd finds the two comparable. And Oliver Willis (who works for Media Matters, which Hillary Clinton claims to have helped establish) makes it even more explicit.
OK, I’m a white guy in one of the whitest states, so I really don’t have much authority in the matter of “blackness.” But I do find it a bit troubling that two indisputably black men are being assailed on being “insufficiently black,” and even more disturbing that a sociopathic killer (OK, never convicted, but found liable in civil court) is being compared — implicitly by Dowd, explicitly by Willis — with an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Except, of course, that to people of Dowd and Willis’ ilk, Thomas is most likely a worse person and a greater public threat than Simpson. And as such, any and all such attacks are not only fair game, but a moral imperative.
