I agree with you completely here. Maureen Dowd should be ashamed of herself, but sadly, she won't be.

She also vindicated those who oppose racial preferences. She dismissed a black man's achievements saying that he would not have achieved them had he been white. I wrote an article about it at my website:
http://www.prudentpolitics.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=91&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Maureen Dowd: The cut and paste cub reporter.

I honestly would not have read her column had you not linked to it twice already.

To be blunt, her piece was almost unreadable.

Clarence Thomas is an important figure in American history and politics. Given his personal history, there is a point to be made about his opinion in the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action.

I hope someone makes that point. And I hope when they do, Dean, if you disagree, you won't call them a bigot or a racist or a hatemonger.

Only a racist would suggest that there's anything wrong with someone opposing Affirmative Action just because he personally benefitted from it, Ara.

I repeat: Only a racist would suggest such a thing.

"why not just run a weekly column by a KKK Grand Dragon?"

Because even Robert Byrd turned them down.

Maureen Dowd is so cynical she should run for office. In fact, she fit in rather well with the Clinton White House throughout the last eight years of the twentieth century did she not? She certainly hates George W. Bush and his father. She always hated Clarence Thomas.

Now she paved the groundwork for her and others to hate Clarence Thomas forever. Rather clever is it not? Dowd gives no credit to Thomas for making it on his own. She snidely dismisses Clarence Thomas’ dissenting opinion by snidely dismissing his opinion as, “giving the effort to balance bigotry in society the moral weight of a Benetton ad.” Is this the stuff of hate or what?

Did Clarence Thomas REALLY require affirmative action to matriculate at Yale? He might have qualified due to good grades and test scores, you know. I do not remember anybody ever actually impugning Clarence Thomas’ academic qualifications, do you? They provided no evidence if so. Maureen Dowd cleverly disguises her own deep-seated hatred of anything conservative, and anything Bush, by cynically influencing others with her own misplaced cynicism.

I do not see Clarence Thomas as “an angry, bitter, self-pitying victim” that Maureen Dowd does. Is this just more NYT or Maureen Dowd propaganda? I believe so. I always read the NYT opinion and editorial pages with a jaundiced eye since I first subscribed to it in 1980. Recent scandals give many good reasons for Americans do so, too. This misdirected rant is just another more good reason.

Dismissing Thomas’ nomination as a “preposterous claim that he was "the best-qualified" man for the job,” is laughable. Does anybody really believe Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Thurgood Marshall were the best-qualified people for SCOTUS? Or, was were they simply totems for the Democratic Party? Roosevelt nominated Felix Frankfurter for Chief Justice of the United States in 1941 even though he had no experience as a judge whatsoever. I wonder why conservatives never mention that when Bush 41 or 43 nominate judges.

Dowd further blames “President Bush, the Yale legacy who also disdains affirmative action,” as “playing affirmative action politics in the preliminary vetting of a prospective Supreme Court nominee” is equally laughable. Does any American actually believe Democrats do NOT play “affirmative action” politics when nominating Ginsberg or Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court? Does our favorite opposition party never play affirmative action politics with ANY appointments? This is very rich indeed.

Maureen Dowd just might be the bellwether Democrats. This woman is clearly angry, ahistorical, and cynical toward anything not liberal. People should read her columns accordingly.

Dean:

Get over yourself. Thomas is a lightweight.

Ara,

Thomas may or may not be a lightweight. But if he is, he is certainly not the only one.

Whether or not he is a lightweight has no bearing on the fact the Dowds statements were bigoted, racist and hateful. They were also blatantly inaccurate.

Get over YOUR self.

It's the mentality that the man has some sort of obligation to defend Affirmative Action because he's black that's racist. Criticize him as a lightweight if you want--I think you're wrong, but you've got the right to your opinions.

Still, it's very hard for me not to see racial overtones in so many of the people who say he is an Uncle Tom, that he is just Scalia's yes-man, that he has no original thoughts of his own, etc. Quite a few legal scholars have reviewed his work and found that this simply is not the case. But people in left-wing circles are so used to having their prejudices about him go unquestioned, they seem almost shocked when someone points out just how nasty they are.

There are some links to some very good reading on Thomas' judicial record on the Justice Thomas Appreciation Page, including listings of some of his more interesting opinions, and links to articles about Thomas' record. It is far more interesting than his critics give him credit for. He's nowhere near the lightweight that some of the other current members of the high court are, in fact.

The hatred aimed at this man is what really disturbs me, though.

So, Dowd decides to write about Thomas's seeming hypocrisy: Affirmative action was good enough for me, but no one else. That topic is fair game, however uncomfortable it might be for some people or however poorly she pursues it. True, Dowd takes it to a very personal level. Then again, so did Thomas.

But to you, calling this hypocrisy is racism. Logic has evidently fled conservatives lately, arguing with conditionals and suppositions as if they had the authority of reality and facts. Last time I checked, "racism" has a meaning: the belief that race determines abilities and that some races are inferior to others.

Calling it racist doesn't make it so.

As for Kevin . . . Pot. Kettle. Black. Dowd is full of hate, but, ah, you aren't. I love the hypocrisy of the Clinton Haters.

Dean: Dowd's argument is illogical as many have pointed out. But does that make her a racist? No, just a very biased liberal.

At least in this article Down tried to make a logical argument, a rarity for her. I am amazed that she stays employed. She has become an embarassment to the left.

Think Dowd is a racist?

A column of hers several years ago about waitressess, "gum popping Flo's" she called them , who supported Clinton was one of the coldest dispargments of any group of people I have ever read. I have never failed to tip well since..

She's just an ass who seems to look down on too many people.