Columnist – John Sammon It’s only fitting that the Republican Party, the party that either stood in the way of legislation that would give black Americans equal rights, or turned a blind eye to racist injustice, the party that never passed in 70 years one piece of progressive legislation, a party that is racist and sexist, pro-war and anti-worker, would suddenly have opportunist blacks like Herman Cain carrying its standard.
You’ve got to give credit to Cain. He recognized that a party that has opposed equality at every turn and traditionally shunned blacks for decades pretending like they didn’t exist would be a wide-open field to politically exploit.
Cain recently said that during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, whose centerpieces included the right to sit at a lunch counter with white customers or sit at the front of a bus, that he remained aloof from the movement because he was too young at the time.
Oh, if we only had more like him we could have them all back in the fields picking cotton, singing “Nobody knows, ‘da trouble I seen,” or “Ole’ Man River.”
Cain is the recipient of the first annual Republican-sponsored “Uncle Tom Token Awards.”
Remember, this is the party of Rick Perry, who has a hunting lodge somewhere in the wilds of Texas with a rock that uses the N word to identify the place, something like “Niggerhead.” His family picked that over “Coonsville” and “Jig Acres.” Every man of action, like Dick Cheney with his anemic heart and shotgun, needs a hunting lodge. Hermann Goering had one called “Carinhall,” named after a deceased wife.
I guess Hermann didn’t know any blacks or he might have renamed it “Spook City,” with a picture of a wide-eyed black eating a watermelon.
Cain is also nominated for the “Uncle Tom Best Excuse” Award for making statements that he was too young at the time of the Civil Rights Movement to participate, so he left it up to Rosa Parks, the little murdered boy in Mississippi Emmett Till, along with the three slain Civil Rights activists Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.
In fairness to Cain, I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t say I didn’t participate in the Civil Rights Movement either. But in fairness to me, I was wrong and I was white, and I was the product of a racist household, and I’m trying to atone for it by doing columns like this.
I think although she is largely out of the picture, a “Lifetime Achievement” Award should be presented to Condoleezza Rice for her participation as an African American token during the Bush Administration, as a loyal mouthpiece who justified wars based on false weapons of mass destruction, wiretap spying in the Patriot Act, torture of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention and all the rest. She has consistently and without fail proved her worth as a loyal Negro stooge to Bush, even though Bush and his henchmen secretly despised her, and her value to the party as a token after former Negro stooge Colin Powell showed a spark of decency and refused to read a prepared script of lies to the public, throwing it on the floor.
And finally, what can you say about Clarence Thomas that hasn’t already been nauseated? Founder of a right-wing group associated with the Tea Party Movement, many of whose members openly despise him for the color of his skin, Thomas is among the most silent of justices on the Supreme Court, seldom venturing a comment, in other words, a “credit to his race” as racists like to say, apparently knowing his place. His lack of verbosity apparently didn’t keep him from making allegedly lewd comments to an attorney, Anita Hill.
To Clarence Thomas goes the “Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows” Award.
Herman Cain To (Hate Merchant) Fascist Fuck Neil Boortz: Liberal Blacks are More ‘Racist’ Than Whites
By: John Dean For good reason, there has been serious hand-wringing over what to do about the ethical lapses of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The fact that Supreme Court justices are exempt from the code of ethical conduct which applies to the rest of the federal judiciary; the problem of bringing a sitting justice before the Congress to question the conduct of a constitutional co-equal; the reality that justices cannot easily defend themselves against news media charges; the defiant, in-your-face posture of Thomas–the list goes on but it need not. There is clear precedent for how to deal with the justice. Thomas could be forced off the bench.
As the associate deputy attorney general in President Richard M. Nixon’s Department of Justice, I was there when Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist outlined how to remove a Supreme Court justice who had engaged in conduct not quite as troublesome as that of Thomas. Rehnquist, of course, would later become chief justice of the United States. His memorandum providing the process for the Department of Justice to proceed against then Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas remains solid precedent and the way to deal with Clarence Thomas. But before looking at the solution, I should explain the problem.
To begin with, there is absolutely no question in my mind that Thomas lied his way onto the Supreme Court in 1991 when he denied Anita Hill’s charges that he had sexually harassed her and some of his other subordinates. If anyone needs proof, please examine the reporting of Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, authors of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas,” which sets forth the case against Thomas with an abundance of clear and convincing evidence (not to mention the evidence corroborating Hill that Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, withheld).
The way Thomas reached the court is important for two reasons. First, there was once a time when those sitting on our highest bench would never do anything to tarnish the court, and this factors into both his conduct and the chances of his removal. Secondly, Thomas’ deceit during his confirmation hearing has overshadowed all of his behavior since he arrived on the court.
Thomas fooled no one when he dissembled in 1991. Those who embrace his consistently radical conservative voting record often overlook how he arrived on the high court, and a few supporters and admirers even defend him by diminishing the significance of his persistently questionable behavior. Those who are unhappy with Thomas as a justice, not to mention his aggressive polarization of the court, find that he has simply lived down to his standards as a scoundrel and fabulist. No one is particularly surprised that his behavior as a justice just keeps sinking lower and lower, constantly reaching new bottoms. (For a catalog that samples Thomas’ failings, see The Reid Report.)Many Supreme Court justices enjoy the company of well-off social friends. Few justices have significant wealth, and since their pay is so low relative to their stature, almost all live quite modestly. There is nothing wrong with justices having a few friends who can occasionally provide an especially pleasant social interlude while seeking nothing other than making life a bit more pleasant for these dedicated public servants. In fact, I have friends who socialize with justices. I can assure you they are all extremely sensitive to the nature of these relationships and would never exploit the friendships.
Thomas and his friends have no such compunctions. Maybe the way Thomas arrived on the court explains why he operates at the outer edges of court propriety, if not beyond. Maybe because he is held in such low esteem by so many on the bench and at the bar he simply does not care. As his book showed, he is a bitter man. The Washington Post noted that he used his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” to “settle scores,” while “scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the ‘mob’ of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life.” In short, he sees himself as a victim, so his actions may be his own private revenge. However, for those who have followed his career, as I have, it was not surprising to see the latest revelation in the New York Times, which reports again about Thomas’ “friendship” with Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and big-time benefactor of conservative causes.This relationship is deeply conflicted because Crow’s financial and political interests are frequently before the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Crow continues to bestow endless gifts and favors on Thomas or fund matters of serious interest to the justice, such as giving Thomas a $19,000 Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, donating $175,000 to finance a library project dedicated to Thomas in Savannah, Ga., and, as was recently revealed, providing not less than $2.8 million to acquire and preserve a crab and oyster cannery near Thomas’ childhood home in Pinpoint, Ga., a project that is operating under Thomas’ supervision.
One suspects this is but the tip of the iceberg because Thomas’ wife, Virginia (known as Ginni), is a Crow-funded conflict of interest with whom the justice literally sleeps. Ginni is not merely a foot-stomping, full-throated tea party activist, but she is a highly paid lobbyist.
According to congressional information, in the past few years she has earned some $700,000 for her tea party work. In addition, Crow reportedly provided Ginni Thomas some $500,000 to start her tea party group, Liberty Central, which pays her so well. Ginni Thomas openly lobbies issues that have or will come before the Supreme Court, such as health care reform.
When 74 Democratic members of Congress requested that Justice Thomas disqualify himself from any ruling on the new health care reform law, which is making its way toward the Supreme Court thanks in part to the efforts of the tea party and Ginni Thomas to have that law ruled unconstitutional, he ignored the request. This is his standard operating procedure. Thomas simply is not troubled by those who are concerned that a justice and his wife directly and indirectly receive financial benefits from “a friend” with both financial and political interests before the court.
Youtube Playlist: Justice Clarence Thomas & Virginia Thomas
The question is what can be done about this problem. Early this year, U.S. Rep. Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced the proposed Supreme Court Transparency and Disclosure Act of 2011 (H.R. 862). When introducing this legislation, which would extend to Supreme Court justices the code of professional conduct that applies to all other federal judges, Murphy cited the conflict of interest and political actions of Justice Clarence Thomas. Recently, the bill received a glimmer of press attention as a result of Thomas’ latest reported shenanigans, and the website Daily Kos is collecting signatures for a petition supporting Murphy’s proposal. In fact, the proposal in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is the proverbial snowball in hell. Nothing is going to come of it, even if Daily Kos collects 100 million signatures. Plus, the proposal is laden with serious constitutional questions and problems. At the top of that list is the likelihood that the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional if it were adopted.
There is a way, nonetheless. As a young official in Nixon’s Department of Justice–and, I must admit, with some amazement–I watched a Republican Justice Department and a conservative attorney general go after a liberal Supreme Court justice with remarkable success. Robert Shogan, a former Los Angeles Times and Newsweek reporter, recounted much of the story in “A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court..” I filled in a few missing pieces when I wrote “The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court.” Rehnquist in those days was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and prepared a detailed memorandum for Attorney General John Mitchell explaining how to undertake an action that had never before been done, namely for the Justice Department to start a criminal investigation of a sitting justice, not based on hard information but rather based mainly on speculation of a worst-case scenario, i.e., assuming gifts and favors were bribes.
With the Rehnquist memo in hand, Mitchell arranged a secret meeting with then Chief Justice Earl Warren, and told Warren that if Fortas did not resign from the court the Justice Department was going to launch an investigation of Fortas’ dealing with a financier, Louis Wolfson, then recently convicted of securities violations, because of Wolfson’s earlier gifts to his friend Fortas and Fortas’ wife. The case against Fortas was weak, yet Mitchell was more than bluffing. He was prepared to have a grand jury determine whether there was a fire amid the smell of smoke. When Fortas, a formidable legal mind, tested the bluff, Mitchell upped the stakes. He passed the word that he was going after Fortas’ wife, Carol Agger, a highly successful tax law specialist, as well as Fortas’ former law partner, Paul Porter. Mitchell said that he was considering reopening a grand jury proceeding that had cleared both Agger and Porter regarding a case disposed of years earlier. This, too, bordered on being a trumped-up charge, but an attorney general can make good on a bluff and actually convene a grand jury. That was not necessary. Rather than put his wife and former partner through the agony, or tarnish the court by the very fact of such a proceeding, Fortas resigned.
The parallels of the Thomas and Fortas behavior is striking. The recent New York Times article strongly suggests that Thomas has failed to file required annual financial statements. He has failed to do this in the past, claiming it an oversight. The line between gifts and bribes in these circumstances is as fine as a hair on a frog’s back. One suspects Thomas and his wife would not do well with close scrutiny. The Rehnquist memo, sitting in the files of the Office of Legal Counsel, provides the precedent to undertake such a federal investigation of both Clarence and Ginni Thomas. Does anyone who follows politics not believe that if the situations were reversed and Republicans found one of the Democrats on the Supreme Court engaging in similar behavior they would not employ the Fortas option? Of course they would.There are two problems with this strategy. First, the Democrats would never do to Thomas what Republicans did to Fortas. For the Republicans, seats on the Supreme Court are worth whatever it takes to get them. They play hardball. For Democrats, well, they play beanbag over judicial appointments. Democrats are willing to toss a few stingers, but never do they truly want to hurt anyone. They cannot help it that they are nice people, and ruthlessness does not work for them. This is why a minority of Republicans in the United States can control the overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents who lean left.
Second problem, Thomas would fight to his last breath to keep his seat. He would claim the Fortas option was an attack on the court–for he already makes a similar claim when anyone is critical of his conduct. If Harlan Crow’s gifts and favors were given with a wink and nod, and in fact turned out to be bribes, and this could be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and Thomas were convicted, I believe that rather than resign he would demand an impeachment proceeding to remove him from the court. Unlike in the case of Abe Fortas, who had deep concern for the court, it is not difficult to believe that Clarence Thomas cares only about Clarence Thomas. There is also the reality that as long as Republicans control the House of Representatives there will never be an impeachment of Thomas. Should Democrats regain control of the House, well, Democrats don’t play hardball.
In short, nothing is going to happen to Clarence Thomas. No one is going to truly challenge his conduct, and he will sit on the Supreme Court until he feels like leaving.
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I’d be interested in your thoughts. Share them on Twitter: @johnwdean.
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Herman Cain’s shtick is a version of race minstrelsy where he performs “authentic negritude” as wish fulfillment for White Conservative fantasies. Like the fountain at Lourdes, Cain in his designated role as black Conservative mascot, absolves the White racial reactionaries of their sins. This is a refined performance that Black Conservatives have perfected over many decades and centuries of practice. — Chauncey DeVega [ READ MORE ]
[By: Dr. Boyce Watkins] Herman Cain Plays the Race Card Against Barack Obama: It appears that Herman Cain, who is expected to be a black presidential candidate, has the race card locked and loaded for his sprint toward the White House.
Recently, Cain was asked about race during a New Hampshire campaign speech. When asked about this controversial topic, Cain had this to say:
“Now people are over this first black president thing,” he said. “But there are some people who will say, ‘I’m not going to vote for another black guy because this one didn’t work out. And my response is, ‘Well, what about those 43 white guys you put in there? How did they work out? Don’t condemn me because the first black one was bad.”
There was another interesting episode when Cain was asked on his radio show why he speaks so highly of the founding fathers, even though they owned slaves.
“They set the bar high when they said all men were created equal,” Cain said. “They could have set it where they were that day. They set it high so this nation could work up to that ideal.”
Herman Cain — A ‘Butt-Licking’ Uncle Tom
One thing that people can say about Herman Cain is that he was a successful businessman. As the CEO and part owner of Godfather’s Pizza, Cain has accumulated enough wealth and success to consider himself to be a serious candidate for the presidency. With that said, Cain also has a set of views that are reflective of the diversity of opinions within the African-American community, presenting an interesting contrast to those who want to put all black people into a nice, neat, little “liberal” box.
Let’s be clear, I don’t agree with Herman Cain. I have a difficult time appreciating any African American who panders for votes by effectively saying, “I stand with you in your disdain for the way black people behave. I assure you that I’m different from the rest of them.”
Such a divide-and-conquer political strategy has been used since we had the house negro/field negro divide during slavery (there is no faster route to the top of the political heap than by becoming a black Republican). Rather than using hatred toward President Obama as a weapon for his own political advancement, Cain might be more respectable if he simply stood on his own credentials (as his fellow conservative Colin Powell might do). Being a black conservative presidential candidate doesn’t mean you have to disrespect the first black president.
With that said, many of Cain’s views reflect a peculiar paradox within the black community: the fact that black people are actually incredibly conservative. When it comes to views on gay marriage, abortion, the separation of church and state, etc., African Americans have quite a few viewpoints that align more closely with the Republican right than with liberals who’ve come to “save us.” The problem for Republicans, however, is that they insist on advocating for programs that hurt the poor, which has a disproportionate impact on the African-American community. Their opposition to Affirmative Action and constant attacks on President Obama don’t help their cause very much either.
While the existence of men like Herman Cain represents a stomach-churning example of how the disease of racism continues to affect our society, the truth is that Cain also represents the very best of what America can possibly be. I won’t vote for Herman Cain, but I am glad that there are black politicians who allow African Americans to jump outside of predefined stereotypes given to us by the media and our political leaders. There’s no one way to be black, and both Herman Cain and President Obama reflect the diversity of the black experience in America.
[ By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson ] New tell-all aims to disrobe and discredit Clarence Thomas: The hot seat just got hotter for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
His ex-girlfriend, Lillian McEwen claims that Thomas had an insatiable lust for pornography, had kinky tastes when it came to sex and engaged in lots of it while they were involved. McEwen, a former assistant U.S. attorney and Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, has taken much flack for publicly blabbing in her graphic kiss and tell memoir “D.C. Unmasked & Undressed: A Memoir” about Thomas’s romantic trysts with her and other women, a whole 19 years after the fact.
Those trysts happened when Thomas was a single man on the prowl. The criticism of McEwen for dredging up old dirt and gossip to peddle a book might be well deserved, except that her tell-all in a sense sheds further light and doubt on Thomas’s sworn testimony during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings in 1991 regarding Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. Hill insisted under oath that Thomas had harassed and that he had a penchant for pornography.
In his testimony, Thomas flatly said that if he had engaged in that kind of behavior other employees would have spoken out in defense of Hill. He was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at the time Hill claimed he harassed her. The fact is that several women did confirm Hill’s charge at the time that Thomas was a serial sexual harasser. But the Judiciary Committee ignored their affidavits and testimony, including that of one who did testify. Still, Thomas penchant for kinky sex, pornography and gutter talk as reprehensible as it might be is not a crime, or maybe should not even be the subject of moral debate.
But Thomas’s possible perjury before a congressional body is a crime. And that could be grounds for legal proceedings against him. But that’s hardly likely since Thomas courtesy of his rich, powerful and corporate-connected protectors seems to have a cast iron shield encasing him. How else to explain the relatively mute public cry of outrage against Thomas for getting caught answering “none” in response to a required financial disclosure statement about outside income from his wife Virginia. Mrs. Thomas got nearly $700,000 as a consultant for the Heritage Foundation from 2003 to 2007. How else to explain the tepid criticism he got for having his bills footed by the ultra-conservative Koch Brothers to attend one of their right-wing confabs, and then refusing to recuse himself from court deliberations in a slew of cases involving corporate political funding and corporate abuses.
Then there was the embarrassing and laughable call that Virginia (“Ginny”) made to Hill last year demanding the she apologize for allegedly slandering Thomas. Hill, in a terse statement, stood by her testimony, and in light of Thomas’s unsavory record she was at best being charitable. Virginia subsequently back-pedaled from the ludicrous apology demand after being the butt of every late night comedian’s taunts.
Thomas at least publicly has seemed unfazed by it all. He pompously and self-righteously struck back in a defiant speech in February to the hard right Federalist Society, in which lambasted anyone who dared criticize him for his blatant transgressions as an enemy of the Supreme Court, democratic institutions, and the country as a whole. He stretched his pomposity to the delusion of grandeur that he was the one justice that kept the barbarians at the gate from destroying America’s freedoms and liberties.
Thomas is no dummy though. He picked his audience well in which to mount his self-defense. And in the process he showed that he could actually put together a string of coherent sentences which hasn’t been the case on the High Court. Thomas is on a record breaking pace, if he hasn’t already broken the record, for being the judge who has gone the longest without uttering a peep during testimony and statements by attorneys presenting oral arguments to the court. At last count silent Thomas was up to five years without a peep.
McEwen may not have had the noblest motives in waiting nearly two decades to poke fun at Thomas, since the mere mention of his name and juicy titillating sex would guarantee a cash register or two to ring. Yet she did perform at least one public service with her book. And that’s to add literally one more chapter in the ongoing exposure of a man who by all accounts lied, cheated, philandered, his way onto the court, and whose opinions and decisions have been the paragon of judicial and legal pig-headedness, incompetence and stone-age retrogression.
Thomas can make all the victim-hood speeches he likes to his ultra-right cheer leading cronies, handlers and protectors and that won’t change. Thanks Lillian for making the much deserved hot seat Thomas is perched on even hotter.
About The Author: Earl Ofari Hutchinson — is an author and political analyst. He hosts national Capitol Hill broadcast radio talk show on KTYM Radio Los Angeles and WFAX Radio Washington D.C. streamed on ktym.com and wfax.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson | His new book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge(Middle Passage Press) was released in January 2010.
Almost every black personality (With exception of fellow Black ReTHUGliTOMS) has cursed the Justice in the name of blackness — surely, where there is smoke, there is fire!
Here goes:
1. Historian John Henrik Clarke called Thomas: A “frustrated slave crawling back to the plantation.”
2. Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders publicly called Justice Thomas an “Uncle Tom” (see Washington Post, May 2, 1995);
3. The Rev. Joseph Lowery publicly said (see Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 4, 1996) that Justice Thomas “has become to many in the African-American community what Benedict Arnold was to the United States, a deserter; what Judas was to Jesus, a traitor, and what Brutus was to Caesar, an assassin.”
4. Movie director Spike Lee called Thomas: “A handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.”
5. Author, June Jordan characterized Thomas him as a “virulent Oreo phenomenon,” a “punk-ass,” and an “Uncle Tom calamity.”
6. Entertainer | Producer | Activist — Harry Belafonte, a friend, advisor and confidant of Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and generations of other human rights activists said of Clarence Thomas: “A slave to white masters.”
7. The late Khalid Abdul Muhammad was blunt and dramatic: “When white folks can’t defeat you, they’ll always find some Negro, some boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger that they can trot out in front of you.” LOL (x100)
[ By: Chauncey DeVega ] Black History Month is Herman Cain Playing the Race Minstrel for CPAC — In the immortal words of Megatron in Transformers: The Movie, Herman Cain’s speech at CPAC really is bad comedy. As you know, I find black garbage pail kids (black conservatives) fascinating — not because of what they believe, but rather because of how they entertain and perform for their White Conservative masters.
When race minstrelsy was America’s most popular form of mass entertainment, black actors would often have to pretend to be white men, who then in turn would put on the cork to play the role of the “black” coon, Sambo, or Jumping Jim Crow. Adding insult to injury, in a truly perverse and twisted example of the power of American white supremacy black vaudevillians would often pretend to be white in order to denigrate black people for the pleasures of the white gaze.
Herman Cain at CPAC
Minstrel Show
Herman Cain–an ironic name if ever, and one more suited to a tragic figure in a Harlem Renaissance era novella–is not “blackening twice” as some race minstrels chose to do.
[ Unfortunately, the attendees at CPAC are not the butt of some type of joke where the white man wearing the cork is really a black man in secret. ]
Instead, Herman Cain’s shtick is a version of race minstrelsy where he performs “authentic negritude” as wish fulfillment for White Conservative fantasies. Like the fountain at Lourdes, Cain in his designated role as black Conservative mascot, absolves the White racial reactionaries at CPAC of their sins. This is a refined performance that Black Conservatives have perfected over many decades and centuries of practice.
Let’s consider the routine. First, Cain enters the stage to Motown music. Then Cain feigns swimming after rolling up his sleeves to show them his black skin and how he is a hardworking negro (not like those other ones). Cain bellows in a preacher affected voice and channels the folksy negro down home accent of his late grandpappy. In the money shot, Cain gives the obligatory “black folks who are not Republicans are on the plantation” speech to the joyous applause of his White benefactors. And he doubles down by legitimating any opposition to President Barack Obama as virtuous and patriotic regardless of the bigoted well-springs from which it may flow.
In total, CPAC is a carnival and a roadshow for reactionary Conservatives. It is only fitting that in the great tradition of the freak show, the human zoo, the boardwalk, and the great midway world’s fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, that there is a Borneo man, a Venus Hottentot or a tribe of cannibals from deepest darkest Africa or Papua New Guinea on display. For CPAC and the White Conservative imagination, Herman Cain and his black and brown kin are that featured attraction.
We always need a monkey in the window, for he/she reminds us of our humanity while simultaneously reinforcing a sense of our own superiority.
Sadly, there are always folks who are willing to play that role because it pays so well.
Feeding The Animals: Re-visiting The ‘Canine‘ CPAC Carnival
UPDATE:
———————————————- Why I Stand By My Criticism of Herman Cain — Even As Right-Wingers Attack Me: Chauncey DeVega responds to attacks from Breitbart and other right-wingers for his criticism of conservative presidential hopeful Herman Cain.
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About The Author: Chauncey DeVega — Editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes which has been featured by the NY Times, the Utne Reader, and The Atlantic Monthly. Writing under a pseudonym, Chauncey DeVega’s essays on race, popular culture, and politics have appeared in various books, as well as on such sites as the Washington Post’s The Root and Popmatters.
It’s only fitting that the Republican Party, the party that either stood in the way of legislation that would give black Americans equal rights, or turned a blind eye to racist injustice, the party that never passed in 70 years one piece of progressive legislation, a party that is racist and sexist, pro-war and anti-worker, would suddenly have opportunist blacks like Herman Cain carrying its standard.
.” I filled in a few missing pieces when I wrote “
.” Rehnquist in those days was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and prepared a detailed memorandum for Attorney General John Mitchell explaining how to undertake an action that had never before been done, namely for the Justice Department to start a criminal investigation of a sitting justice, not based on hard information but rather based mainly on speculation of a worst-case scenario, i.e., assuming gifts and favors were bribes.
” and “
.”
” about Thomas’s romantic trysts with her and other women, a whole 19 years after the fact. 
Black History Month is Herman Cain Playing the Race Minstrel for CPAC — In the immortal words of Megatron in Transformers: The Movie, 
