Presswatch/Witch Doctor
Eastland, Terry
President Reagan's most spectacular legislative victories. I'm not saying that everything in our domestic-spending scheme of things is perfect. But Social Security pays for itself and ought to be...
...Now, Ph.Ds are sometimes referred to by the press as Dr...
...Thomas: The Untold Story" (nothing new in this "untold story...
...It was made on flimsy evidence...
...The writer also found Hill's impact in the record number of sexual harassment charges filed this year with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
...Those kind of views can be easily changed...
...I hope no one imagines these decisions would be based on careful policy analyses...
...But Social Security pays for itself and ought to be left alone until changes are designed specifically to meet the financing requirements of the next fifty years...
...But the smart Hill had picked her network, and perhaps also her interviewer...
...women" (meaning Democratic women) who stood good chances of winning...
...This is all happening not in faraway Latin America or Yugoslavia, but in places familiar to many in the audience—cities like Gagry or Sukhumi, once-blooming resort towns where "middle-class" Muscovites would spend summer vacation...
...Most members will make their budget decisions on the basis of factors such as interest group pressure or a desire to accommodate the leadership or other colleagues...
...No writer supported his confirmation...
...Paul Simon the right to determine that show's guest: David Brock had been approached about being on the show, but Simon said that he would not be paired with the investigative journalist, and so he was not...
...The same poll a year ago showed Thomas believed by 47 percent, Hill by 24...
...Witch Doctor by Terry Eastland 56 The American Spectator December 1992 S he has done so shrewdly, with legions of help...
...Congress is in no mood to cut spending on popular domestic programs...
...Universities and law schools have held numerous symposia on sexual harassment, the subtext being that We Believe Anita.1 Last August, the American Bar Association even gave her an award...
...At least "Larry King Live" had the pretense of two sides...
...Don't expect Thomas ever to get one...
...Other accounts of Hill's Georgetown speech left out this remarkable business of "I and my reality...
...Changed by the introduction of new and presumably non-flimsy evidence...
...Read on...
...Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, when people look back at these hearings, how do you want them to think of you...
...But how can either justify saying she is "the winner" over Thomas...
...He reads and thinks about cases...
...Hollywood producers (of "Murphy Brown," "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill," and "Designing Women") have celebrated her in their creations...
...Her lead: "Anita F. Hill was the loser in her battle with Clarence Thomas a year ago...
...All of this, bear in mind, occurred in an election year in which the Hill-inspired candidates and their helpers talked up sexual harassment and invoked the name of the Oklahoma law professor...
...NBC's "Today Show" had on a solid phalanx of pro-Hill types—no Thomas supporters allowed...
...For example, as readers of this magazine well know (see David Brock's March piece "The Real Anita Hill"), one of Hill's witnesses, Susan Hoerchner, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a pre-testimony interview that in March 1981—six months before she ever met Clarence Thomas—Hill told her she had been sexually harassed...
...Larry King Live" in effect allowed Sen...
...so, too, did U.S...
...CBS and NBC, on the other hand, broadcast retrospectives that pup-pressed any such questions...
...The fair conclusion is the narrow one of her catalytic, post-confirmation effects...
...So the responsible subcommittees and committees face tough decisions: On what basis can they keep SSI fully funded but cut AFDC, or vice versa...
...But as time passes, she is looking more and more like the winner...
...Hill chose that day to set up—she was an organizer—a conference at the law school on "Race, Gender, and Power in America...
...II Moscow How quickly your world changes after a few days in Moscow...
...I begin with Jill Abramson's front-page piece in the October 5 Wall Street Journal...
...Did she lie...
...Your confusion is compounded each time you turn on the news and see tanks in the streets, helicopters, anti-aircraft guns, rockets, and young men running around with machine guns and other young men carried away on stretchers...
...Neither Couric nor any other journalist granted time with Hill has asked such obvious questions as: "Professor Hill, you told the Senate Judiciary Committee you had nothing to gain from your testimony last fall...
...adopted since Brezhnev's 1977 revision)—has entered a lively phase...
...Meanwhile, those who might have been brazen enough to ask such questions during a radio or television retrospective have not been given equal time—or, in some cases, any time...
...The current railing against entitlements and "out-of-control" budgets is badly misplaced...
...Perhaps next October Katie Comic can ask Anita—er, Dr...
...Hill," the rest of the sentence went, "gave her retrospective view of the hearings in the arcane language of the academic doctrines currently fashionable in legal and literary criticism...
...Kravchenko, whose first move at Soviet broadcasting was to pronounce that he was first and foremost a loyal servant to President Gorbachev, now says that he Dead Meat by Cathy Young 58 The American Spectator December 1992...
...Katie Couric asked: "You talked, Anita [Anita!], about some of the very supportive letters you've gotten, and some of the letters that have touched you...
...she has both a public relations consultant and a lecture agent...
...Closer to home, the "trial of the century"—the Communist party's suit to have Yeltsin's ban on its activities overturned by the Constitutional Court (even though no one knows exactly what constitution its rulings are supposed to be based on, since no new one has been Cathy Young, our regular Russian Presswatch columnist, is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...The issue remains what Anita Hill alleged...
...Abramson's piece mentioned some of these facts about the relative positions of Thomas and Hill vis-a-vis the public but failed to acknowledge the inherent unfairness of any year-later poll asking "Who do you think was telling the truth about Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas...
...He doesn't give speeches or interviews about his work, much less his confirmation, and it would be unseemly if he did...
...S. News & World Report had similar numbers showing a "dramatic shift in public sentiment"), they were worthless...
...Hill or Professor Hill, as per the newspaper's style, Barringer, moving to a discussion of the professor's speaking style, suddenly called her Dr...
...A Northwestern University survey conducted in the late 1980s found support levels for maintaining or increasing expenditures for all social programs, ranging between 97.5 percent for Medicare to 75.6 percent for the least popular, food stamps...
...Hill—what she meant...
...My favorite Hill story was filed by Felicity Barringer of the New York Times, a report on the professor's October 15 appearance at the Georgetown University Law Center...
...Most people can't even figure out what is being contested...
...Changing from entitlement funding to annual appropriation will not lead to lower spending for any program that enjoys broad political support...
...NBC,.moreover, had the chance to grill Anita Hill, as she consented to an interview...
...Thus, as the Washington Times opined, "One and only one party to this controversy has continued to press its case [in public] this past year, and that is Miss Hill...
...otherwise the quote would look, well, strange: "Because I and my reality did not comport with what they accepted as their reality," Hill said, "I and my reality had to be reconstructed by the Senate committee members with assistance from the press and others...
...Did she tell the truth...
...Now, I have no doubt that Hill was a "catalyst" of liberal candidacies and also sexual harassment filings...
...They find you offensive, most of all because you are a black woman...
...Having referred in the first several paragraphs to Ms...
...Declining to discuss her charges of last October and never mentioning Clarence Thomas, she instead has focused on sexual harassment in general terms, picking her media spots and her speaking audiences...
...To bolster her conclusion she reported some "news"—the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll of registered voters showing that 44 percent now believe Hill told the truth, while only 34 percent sided with Thomas...
...Although the Journal had the time and resources to pursue this line of inquiry, Abramson noted simply that there have been "no substantive new disclosures about the truth of either her allegations or Justice Thomas's flat denial...
...Was she crazy...
...President Bush and other leading Republicans were situated to defend Thomas and praise his addition to the Court, but, as Abramson quoted me saying, "The GOP, wrongly, has been unwilling to acknowledge the significant plus" of his appointment...
...It took the Gorbachev flap to revive interest in the case...
...So-and-so, but J. D.s are never doctored...
...A remarkable turnaround," Abramson called it...
...appearing instead was a former aide to John Sununu, Ed Rogers, who did a pathetic job...
...most don't, but when has that ever mattered to government...
...In late September, subpoenaed as a witness, the former Soviet president refused to appear in court...
...Every poll taken over the last two decades has shown overwhelming public support for the major elements of the welfare state...
...Hill at this point in the story...
...Few Russians, other than the small group of loonies demonstrating in front of the Lenin Museum, seem to care about the fate of the late CPSU...
...Instead, you find yourself preoccupied with privatization vouchers, the Communist party trial, soaring prices, the war in Georgia...
...Besides, Social Security and other entitlements incontestably enjoy the support of the American people...
...Abramson, the thrust of whose stillin-the-works book on the Hill-Thomas business was apparent, explained that Hill became "a catalyst for candidacies by Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency (The Free Press...
...Barringer evidently did not want to quote Hill before letting readers know this was Dr...
...October 15 was the first anniversary of Thomas's confirmation by the Senate...
...Pavel Felgengauer, a political and military affairs reporter for the Independent Gazette, suggests that the nearby horrors might have one salutary effect: anything that scares Russian viewers out of their wits might deter them from rash actions that could lead to ethnic and civil warfare...
...The National Organization for Women and other feminist groups constantly harp on their agreement with Hill ("We Believe Anita Hill," say NOW T-shirts on one side, "One Year Later" on the other...
...And contrary to what you told the Senate, you are now writing a book...
...Gorbachev claims he is being scapegoated, and may have a point...
...The "democrats," of course, despise Gorbachev for trying to save the Soviet empire while the Communists hate him for wrecking it...
...Gorbachev's foreign passport, as has been widely reported, was cancelled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the request of the Constitutional Court until he complies with the subpoena...
...As for the Journal/NBC poll and others like it (U...
...its former functionaries, with few exceptions, care least of all, having moved to cushy jobs in private firms and joint ventures...
...Earlier this year the Southern California Law Review published twenty-five articles on the Thomas hearings...
...News & World Report, which misleadingly titled its piece "Hill vs...
...Whatever the accusations, they are all old hat...
...Then show us some of this evidence...
...Let me explain: Clarence Thomas has been a Justice since last October...
...But it is not very helpful to tar all entitlements with the same brush: taking the ax to so vast and inchoate a set of programs as "entitlements" makes no more sense than any other exercise in guilt by association...
...But your speeches command fees as high as $11,000 and you actually have a lecture agency—the Leigh Bureau in Princeton, New Jersey...
...Consider the Independent Gazette's recent interview with Leonid Kravchenko, who as chief of the Soviet State Broadcasting Company presided over the 1991 effort to roll back glasnost in broadcasting...
...Hill...
...Given a press that also believes Anita and whose coverage of all things Hill and Thomas was shaped by that belief—"Keep tip the campaign to stop sexual harassment," editorialized USA Today—why shouldn't Hill's numbers be up and Thomas's down...
...Why the Dr...
...Suddenly, the American presidential campaign, which interests very few people here—and for various obscure reasons, they seem to like Bush—is on the periphery...
...There is no balm in Gilead for our budgetary woes...
...To most, his refusal to testify is yet another manifestation of arrogance...
...Didn't you have something to gain from testifying against Clarence Thomas...
...he writes opinions...
...If Congress should ever decide that we are spending too much money on, say, price supports, it could change the authorizations that produce that spending almost as easily as it could cut appropriations for, say, NASA...
...A few entitlement programs pay their own way...
...Hill...
...Perhaps with this disclosure in mind, the Journal piece did acknowledge that questions have been raised about Hill's credibility...
...The American Spectator December 1992 57 How much was your advance...
...Not true...
...171/ n case you've forgotten, it was a year ago last October that Anita Hill formally accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment...
...Instead, Abramson quoted a "poll expert" from the University of New Hampshire: "When people made their mind up at the time [October 1991] it was a snap decision...
...Of course, journalism did not forget, and its Hill-Thomas retrospectives and pieces on Hill's various commemorative activities showed it shamefully on her side...
...Have you received any hate mail...
...Evidently in search of balance, the editors said that one of Anita Hill's lawyers would contribute a piece to a later issue titled "The People v. Anita Hill...
...Ostensibly, the anti-Communist side wants to prove that the CPSU arrogated to itself supreme powers over the state and the economy, but then it shifts focus and says the party's real crime was to abuse those powers to the detriment of the people...
...The reason it does not change them is that those programs have strong political backing...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
