Resigned To Lo-Jinks In High Places

Dear Justice Thomas:

I just didn’t get it.

Then it hit me, as I sat in the House gallery for the State of the Union speech, watching you watch President Clinton as he got away with it.

You looked clenched. I think I know why. You must have been seething.

You go through a harrowing and historic “he said, she said” and wind up a pariah. The president goes through a harrowing and historic “he said, she said” and winds up more popular than ever.

You had the Furies descend on you. He has women shrugging, “Boys will be boys.”

I mean, all you did to Anita Hill was talk dirty. (Of course, vivid descriptions of bestiality in porno flicks might not be everybody’s idea of office dish.) And you were a bachelor at the time. Compared with the married president’s allegedly insatiable needs, your tee-heeing about a hirsute Coke can looks almost quaint. You must be perplexed about why one man’s high-tech lynching is another’s high-tech absolution.

When you told your whopper seven years ago - that you hadn’t sexually harassed a young subordinate at the very time you were the nation’s watchdog over workplace harassment - I thought that disqualified you from such an august office.

But that was before America loosened up and decided it was OK for our highest officials to act wantonly and lie blatantly. We haven’t grown more sophisticated. We’ve just grown more resigned. You-just-don’t-get-it has devolved to everybody-does-it.

If you’re still keen to watch those sexplicit tapes, grab a law clerk and enjoy. Get on Bill Clinton’s conga line!

You were right about the feminists. They never cared about gender politics. They just cared about politics.

It’s not sexual harassment if the harasser is a champion of women’s issues, right? Or if the women are NOCD (not our class, Darling)? You just chose the wrong kind of girl. Yale, religious, primly dressed. Next time, date down. Check out the rope line.

Given the new libertine mood in Washington, the fact that you never groped Hill was a stirring example of judicial restraint. And she only followed you from job to job; Monica Lewinsky followed the president from room to room.

The feminists - who see Monica as a predator and Anita as a victim - don’t seem interested in getting to the bottom of a cascade of allegations about Clinton that seem to indicate, at the least, lack of concern for the feelings of his wife and daughter.

They were not in full throat when James Carville suggested Paula Jones was trailer trash, when Bob Bennett compared Paula Jones to a dog, when Clintonites wrote up talking points to discredit Kathleen Willey, and when the Clinton attack team roughed up Lewinsky. Easy to do, of course, since she is every wife’s biggest fear.

After all the years and effort put into trying to change the climate, so that men could not claim that a woman who was raped had it coming to her if she flirted or wore a short skirt, or liked sex, feminists let the Clintonites get away with painting Lewinsky as slutty because she flirted, wore short skirts and liked sex.

Funny, I thought feminism was devised to root out all those “he’s a stud, she’s a slut” double standards.

So far, the Clintonites have been successful in persuading the public that a 21-year-old intern was able to overpower the will of the most powerful man on Earth and vamp her way past Secret Service agents to force him to do her vixen bidding. The smear’s working. A Fox TV News poll that asked if Lewinsky is “a young tramp looking for thrills” found a majority of Americans nodding.

At your Senate hearing, I was outraged that no one really seemed to be looking for the truth, that for everyone - the senators, feminists, conservatives and civil rights groups - all that mattered was self-interest.

But now, Bill Clinton and his enablers have made lying such an art form that the truth is not merely obscured. It is unattainable. Now you can relax, Justice Thomas. You were just ahead of your time.

P.S.: Are you part of Hillary’s right-wing conspiracy?

xxxx