Nice article by James Kirchick on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that summarizes my feelings on the matter: the vicious attacks on Clarence Thomas by vindictive liberals were hypocritical at best, and racist at worst.
How can you support a policy of racial preferences and then attack one of its supposed beneficiaries as undeserving? This, ultimately, is the intrinsic hypocrisy of the Thomas bashers. They allege that he's not competent and that the only reason he became a Supreme Court justice was because he's black. And in so doing, they level the exact same arguments against Thomas that they castigate conservatives for making about affirmative action itself. But let's face facts: A program that gives people with a certain skin color an advantage will invariably reward some who would otherwise not qualify.Exactly. It seems the only “good” affirmative action hires, according to liberals, are those who not only meet the racial requirements, but ideological ones as well—preferably a fellow liberal. But if you’re a minority and, say, a conservative, you automatically become “unqualified” or “incompetent.” This is the type of discrimination that is practiced by liberals, but it’s not called that, of course, because there’s this nutty belief out there that liberals do not discriminate. They do.
