Frank Rich on Clarence Thomas

Great title: "Nobody Knows the Lynchings He’s Seen" (by Frank Rich). Oh, seriously, I'm not going to read Clarence Thomas' book. The guy, frankly, bores me. Heck, Scalia may be a right-wing nut, but at least he's colorful. Thomas, on the other hand, generally comes across as a not-so-thoughtful bullshit artist at best.

One of Thomas' big gripes in life is affirmative action. Ironically, he likely benefited from it. Which, I guess, makes him one of affirmative action's biggest mistakes. He made it all the way to the Supreme Court, after all.

One bit piqued my curiosity:

Mr. Thomas seems ignorant of this changing America. He can never see past his enemies' list, which in his book expands beyond his political foes, Yale and the press to "elite white women" and "paternalistic big-city whites" and "light-skinned blacks." (He does include a warm mention of Mr. Thurmond, a supporter in 1991, without mentioning that the senator hid away a child fathered with a black maid.) Always eager to cast himself as a lynching victim, Mr. Thomas is far more trapped in the past than the 1960s civil-rights orthodoxy he relentlessly demonizes.

Light-skinned blacks? Paternalistic big-city whites? What the f—?