Webloggin » Another Logic Failure

Funnily enough, just after having written my post about your average liberal’s shaky grasp on cause and effect, I read the following two paragraphs in the New York Times‘ latest mean-spirited attack on Clarence Thomas:

In the last 100 Supreme Court arguments, Clarence Thomas has not uttered a word. Court watchers have suggested a variety of explanations. Among the least flattering: he is afraid that if he speaks he will reveal his ignorance about the case; he is so ideologically driven that he invariably comes with his mind made up; or he has contempt for the process.

In their provocative new book, “Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas,” two Washington Post journalists, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, ponder Justice Thomas’s extraordinary silence, and many other puzzles. They offer a wealth of insight, but they have no answer to the central enigma he poses: why the justice who has faced the greatest hardships regularly rules for the powerful over the weak, and has a legal philosophy notable for its indifference to suffering.

If I were an intelligent, logical person, having read the above, I just might say to myself that Clarence Thomas has realized that the same system that might have given him an advantage over others, has also left him open to crude attacks claiming that he’s stupid, stupid, stupid.

In other words, Thomas might feel that a system doesn’t provide any real benefit to people if it gives them a leg up, only to hold that fact against them forever. He might think there’s more virtue to a system that prohibits schools and employers from slapping people down (that is, discriminating against them). In the latter kind of a system, people who succeed — as Thomas did — will be understood to have succeeded on their own merit. In the former system, the one the liberals insist Thomas perpetuate, you end up with programs that give large benefits to very small numbers of people, that give no benefits to most people, and that taint with the smell of failure and incompetence everyone they touch.

[Discuss this article with Bookworm over at the Bookworm Room...]