Armond White — Confirmation: High-Tech Sleazing

The new movie about the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings turns history to fodder.

 

 

(The National Review)

Who could have guessed that the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee’s Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings would set the tone for American political and television culture for years to come?

 

Those hearings became an embarrassing nationally televised spectacle, foreshadowing the O. J. Simpson trial, the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky disgrace, and other degradations that exposed American social habits. The public has ever since regarded race, sex, and political power in tabloid terms. 

The new HBO movie Confirmation can’t avoid those terms, since they have become the lingua franca of our political discourse. It begins promisingly, going back to the partisan rejection of President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, setting a pattern of shameless Democrat vs. Republican gamesmanship that still exists today. This leads to the fight against President George Herbert Walker Bush’s nomination of Thomas in 1991, typified by a clip from a TV interview of New York activist Flo Kennedy inciting her audience: “Kill him [Thomas] politically and kill Bush in the meantime.”

Read the full article HERE.