Joe Biden: the 2016 HBO movie, Confirmation, about the 1991 Hill/Thomas hearings, will hurt him [View all]

[pnwmom]

in the eyes of many -- especially those who have forgotten how he treated Anita Hill during the hearings prior to Clarence Thomas's confirmation. And those who are too young to have watched those hearings. Her story is going to sound different to 2016 ears than it did in 1991, when most of the country was barely waking up to the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace.

The cast is stellar -- including Kerry Washington as Anita Hill and Greg Kinnear as Joe Biden. So this show will get a lot of attention.

And if it sticks strictly to known facts -- if it uses the transcript of the hearing without serious alteration -- people will be reminded of how the Democrat leading the Committee, Joe Biden, repeatedly insisted on giving the benefit of the doubt to Clarence Thomas -- which could only mean that Hill was delusional or lying.

What many don't know was that a second black woman was waiting in another room to testify that she'd had a similar experience with Judge Thomas. And Joe Biden made the decision not to allow her to testify.

So, the Repubs can thank Joe Biden for his assistance in getting Clarence Thomas on the Court.

ON EDIT: according to MSNBC, there were actually two other women who could have corroborated Hill's story if they had been allowed to testify.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/16/kerry-washington-anita-hill_n_7594876.html

In 1991, as the Senate Judiciary Committee deliberated over the final vote that would ultimately place Clarence Thomas on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court, Hill reluctantly stepped forward and accused the Supreme Court justice nominee of sexually harassing her.

Hill's claims triggered a three-day investigation, and included Hill's nationally televised testimony. Despite Hill's detailed and disturbing testimony, less than a quarter of Americans believed Hill's claims at the time, according to The Washington Post.

"A generation of people who don't even know that it happened are now going to work and experiencing this," Hill told Jon Stewart during a "Daily Show" appearance last year. "They see the signs now that say sexual harassment is prohibited, but they don't know how we got there."

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/joe-biden-no-savior-progressives

As Senate Judiciary chairman, Biden angered some women’s rights advocates with his handling of Clarence Thomas’s contentious 1990 confirmation hearings, in which Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by a female subordinate, Anita Hill. Biden didn’t allow testimony from two of Hill’s female colleagues who would have corroborated Hill’s claims, but he did allow a parade of witnesses to challenge Hill’s credibility, often in flatly sexist terms. (One suggested Hill might suffer from “erotomania.”)