New York Times puts out another left-wing hit piece on Justice Clarence Thomas
So, judges are not allowed to have friends now, according to The New York Times.
The liberal organ’s character assassination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas continued over the weekend with a hefty hit piece titled “Where Clarence Thomas Entered an Elite Circle and Opened a Door to the Court.”
The other 4,000 words are laced with the usual smear and innuendo we’ve come to expect from the left in their attempts to destroy the court’s most consequential justice.
Let’s cut to the chase.
This is the Democrats and their media allies undermining an institution they can’t control.
That’s all.
Their problem with Thomas is that he’s black, conservative and effective.
And that is not allowed.
If you’re not in lockstep with the leftist agenda, then “you ain’t black,” to quote Joe Biden’s immortal phrase when he lost his temper with a black radio host he thought was not being sufficiently obsequious.
Dems hate Clarence Thomas, all right.
The second African-American judge to sit on the court and its longest-serving member, he is a threat to their lock on the black vote and a rebuke to their self-serving “equity” agenda of institutionally sanctioned racism.
But there is nothing among all the thin tales of rich friends to justify all the journalistic resources, nothing to suggest that Thomas, 75, has allowed those friendships to influence his decisions, or that his friends ever have had cases before the court.
The Times tries to turn Thomas’ altruistic efforts mentoring a generation of promising black students into a negative.
It portrays as sinister his membership of the Horatio Alger Association, whose website says it “assists high school students who have faced and overcome great obstacles to pursue their dreams through higher education.”
How nefarious can you get, helping underprivileged kids go to college.
Role model
Thomas, the Times tut tuts, has been “meeting with and mentoring the recipients of millions of dollars a year in Horatio Alger college scholarships, many of whom come from backgrounds that mirror his own.”
Shame on him!
The association in 1992 gave Thomas its lifetime membership award, presented each year to people who uphold the values of “personal initiative and perseverance, leadership and commitment to excellence, belief in the free-enterprise system and the importance of higher education [and] community service.”
Its biography of Thomas shows that he embodies those values.
“Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia. When he was two, his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to care for two sons. When Thomas was seven, they moved into his grandfather’s tenement building in Savannah, where they shared their one-room apartment’s kitchen with other residents. . . .
“During his early childhood, Thomas attended segregated public and parochial schools. . . .
“He graduated in the top 7 percent of his class and went on to receive a law degree from Yale in 1974.”
What a success story! What a role model!
But, no, the Times and the Dems want to destroy his reputation so that no impoverished black kid will follow in his footsteps. If you have a single egalitarian bone in your body, you have to see how detestable their hatchet jobs are.
Beyond the ‘pal’
The Times sneers at Thomas’ relatively modest financial circumstances — because he used his brains and work ethic to serve on the Supreme Court the past three decades rather than make a fortune with Big Law.
It baselessly suggests he has an unhealthy interest in material wealth: “His friendships forged through Horatio Alger have brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege.
“Over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties.”
Billionaire David Sokol is singled out for special attention. In 2015, the Times notes, “the Sokols hosted the Thomases for a visit to their sprawling Montana ranch.”
So. What.
Check out this massive scoop: “Justice Thomas and Mr. Sokol have enjoyed royal treatment at [University of Nebraska] football games, sitting in a suite with all-access passes, according to emails obtained through a public records request.”
Truly heinous behavior.
“One 2020 photo shows the justice and Mr. Sokol standing behind a barbecue grill, wearing matching white chef’s toques.”
How will the republic survive such an assault?
The Times also went digging for dirt on Thomas’ house purchase in Virginia and came up with nothing.
He and his wife Ginny “took out a 95 percent loan to buy the $522,000 house [in 1992], property records show. (Since then, the Thomases have refinanced several times and taken out lines of credit, and . . . property records indicate that they owe as much as they did when they bought it.)”
In other words, Thomas lives within his means, unlike others in Washington, DC.
Oh, that the Times would show a smidge of the same curiosity about “working class Joe” Biden’s lavish real estate holdings and rich friends.
Hunter’s shrink tells truth with ‘high’ art
Hunter Biden’s former psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow now also has a sideline career as an artist — and he has created a surreal new artwork for his former patient: a gigantic prescription form advising him to “blow paint,” not “blow.”
The first son has taken up a painting career in recent years, creating artworks in which he blows droplets of ink with a metal straw onto paper — and then tries to sell them for as much as $500,000 a piece.
Ablow’s prescription artwork encourages Hunter, 53, to continue channeling his passions into blowing ink, as a substitute for using drugs.
In light of speculation over who owns the cocaine stash found at the White House last week, Ablow also points out how difficult it is to get over a cocaine addiction.
While at pains to say he is not talking about the president’s son, whom he treated for drug addiction in 2018 and 2019, Ablow says “relapsing for people who have been addicted to cocaine is very common. . . . It is such an easy way to dodge your inner truth [but] one thing about emotional pain is you can’t outrun it forever.”
Photos from Hunter’s abandoned laptop of his Porsche dashboard that show him hitting speeds of 172 mph in the summer of 2018, or appearing to smoke crack behind the wheel, also prompted comment from Ablow.
Ablow said that when he saw the photos recently in the press, he viewed them as a “metaphor “for Hunter’s life.”
“It doesn’t take a psychiatrist, and certainly not his psychiatrist, to ask whether that picture doesn’t tell the story of his life in some way because he lost his mother and his sister in a car crash [when he was two] and there he is in a car going at 170 miles high on crack.
“You can’t outrace that magnitude of loss. You can’t drug yourself into oblivion after you’ve experienced that. . . .
“Hence the suggestion to be an artist, if that is where your passion is, and don’t drug yourself.
“Artists are often reprocessing pain but productively. They are alchemists. They take pain and they turn it into meaningful images.”
Partisan budgets?
You can tell a lot about the dueling Special Counsel presidential probes from how much taxpayer money they are spending.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, investigating former president Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, has spent $9.25 million so far, according to Justice Department expenditure documents released Friday.
That is almost eight times more than the $1.2 million spent by Robert Hur, who is investigating President Joe Biden for the same thing.
Smith has been operating longer: 19 weeks by March 31, compared to 11 weeks for Hur.
Smith spent $486,705 per week compared to Hur who spent $108,013. So, on a pro rate basis, Smith outspent Hur fourfold.
While Smith has a wider scope, it’s clear his office is more energetic and proactive than Hur’s, and not just because it leaks more.
For example, Smith spent $1.9 million on “contractual services” – which included $1,674,947 for “litigation/investigative support”.
Hur spent just $29,823 on “contractual services”, and that was just for “IT services” and “transcripts”. No “litigation” or “investigation.”
You don’t really need to look at the books to know which Special Counsel is a killer on a mission and which is a pussycat coloring inside the lines.
