Saturday, October 23, 2010

Why is Virginia Thomas in the news?

An odd thing has been making its way through the news lately, that being that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has popped her head up to bring up an old beef with Anita Hill and I'd guess creating quite a bit of embarrassment for her husband.

The news is common enough, and covers it well here. So enjoy the read if you've managed to miss this piece of news.

So why is she bringing herself to the fore again with this same old story? Honestly, I didn't care when I heard the news. Sounded like a case of an annoyed woman bringing up old news because she had been holding it in, and had the strange thought to bring it up. And so we have the news.

But a conversation with my father pointed me out to the more obvious conclusion that I should have guessed and probably wiser heads than mine have come to as soon as the news broke, that it is for political reasons. With an agenda, Virginia Thomas had a very effective tool for getting her name the google searches, page hits, tweets  and "bloglosophizing" that is typically warranted to a celebrity sex video. By bringing up other sex related charges again and goading your target into creating a public complaint. In a way it is quite clever in that she herself didn't create the news herself, but rather Anita Hill.

All these are fine and dandy from an effectiveness position. It's not the first nor the last time a person has leveraged something for political exposure.

But what annoys me is something brought to my attention that she has said in the past. According to an interview in 2007:

Virginia Thomas: “I think there’s a lot of theories, but I hope she one day calls up and apologizes, and I look forward to forgiving her.



To Mrs. Thomas: If you looked forward to forgiving someone so much, I'm sure you could have managed to do that on your own time without needing a prompt from Ms. Hill. If you had managed to do that before, we wouldn't have this news taking up airtime. But then again, that'd be a waste of a publicity bomb wouldn't it? So congratulations, you are newsworthy again Mrs. Thomas. 

I'd add some links, but I'm sure you all can do a search on "the google" if you guys want, and there's new stuff every day. I'll admit I was curious myself.





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