Clarence Thomas, liar.

When I watched the Thomas confirmations as a college junior, I assumed Anita Hill was telling the truth and Thomas was lying for the simple fact that he had much more to gain by lying. (And I voted for 41 twice, so that assumption wasn't clouded by partisanship.)

It just didn't seem plausible that Hill would make a bunch of random stuff up about porn and pubic hairs, just to mess with Thomas.

A new book about Clarence Thomas, Supreme Discomfort, pretty much confirms my suspicions.

Some juicy passages:

James Millet [Thomas's Holy Cross classmate and a Census Bureau statistician], who doesn't know Hill and has never been interviewed until now, recalled an almost identical episode at Holy Cross. He was in Thomas's room one evening with several other guys. A Coke can was on Thomas's desk. Thomas walked up to it, as Millet recalls, looked inside and said: "Somebody put a pubic hair in my Coca-Cola."

Kind of implausible that's a coincidence, no?

And:

As a young federal bureaucrat in Washington, Thomas rented adult videos from Graffiti, a store of Dupont Circle. It was there that Fred Cooke, the former D.C. corporation counsel, saw him at the checkout line during the late 1980s with a copy of The Adventures of Bad Mama Jama, a triple-X-rated flick featuring the sexual exploits of a hugely overweight black woman with abnormally large breasts. Cooke was both struck and amused that the chairman of the EEOC was a consumer of such smut.

Also damaging to Thomas is Angela Wright (who never testified, but was interviewed by the Senate committee) who worked with Thomas at the EEOC and who claimed that Thomas "asked her the size of her breasts" and "pressured her to date him" and the fact that Thomas refused to take a polygraph test to refute Hill's -- which I never knew. It's just too much.

Anyway, the book is a good, lively read, and it's got a lot more to it than just the confirmation hearings. Check it out.