For the Record

■ Two conclusions can be drawn from Clarence Thomas nomination: 1) it has fractured traditional black political leadership in America; 2) the confirmation process itself was mortally wounded by Judiciary Committee’s handling of Robert Bork. . . . Alan Keyes, the conservative black president of Citizens against Government Waste, says the confirmation battle heralds “the end of totalitarianism in the black community. One way or another this thing has broken it up.” … As evidence, Benjamin Hooks’s NAACP opposed Thomas, the National Urban League remained neutral, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—which Martin Luther King Jr. founded—came out in favor of confirmation. In endorsing Thomas, SCLC’s president Joseph Lowery said he doubted that Thomas “will march robotically to the beat of the right-wing drum corps.” And he took a swipe at Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for its Pavlovian rejection of Thomas. “The CBC,” Lowery says, “set themselves up as the voice of black America. They were rounding third base before the umpire said play ball.” . . . On the confirmation process, Sen. Slade Gorton (R., Wash.) pointed out in announcing his support of Thomas that “when a majority of the Judiciary Committee rejected Robert Bork, it condemned itself to a set of bland, inconclusive hearings like those on David Souter and Clarence Thomas. Knowing that a precise answer to a single question may cost the nominee any chance of confirmation, it is hardly surprising that all such questions are ducked.” . . . Katherine Franke, former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, came to much the same conclusion in the leftist Guardian. “Liberals,” she says, “remain stuck in the residual euphoria of the defeat of Robert Bork. Indeed, they act almost like deer, transfixed by oncoming headlights in the middle of a highway, ignorantly boasting: ‘Make my day, bring on another Bork.’ The nominees come and go, and the liberals don’t even know what hit them.” . . . Robert & Linda Lichter, whose Media Monitor polices media coverage of news events, reports the media were more hostile to Thomas than to Bork during the interval between nomination and start of Senate hearings. Three-fifths of the 337 evaluations of Thomas (New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN) were negative; coverage of Bork was evenly balanced between negative and positive assessments in same interval.

■ Hideous problem for the Left: How to survive collapse of Soviet Communism? Columnist Phil Gasper of radical Guardian says it is wrong to “see the collapse of Stalinism as somehow a setback for the Left. Why?” Because, he says, analysts on Left fail to realize that “the society that Stalin built on the ruins of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was simply a variant of capitalism [emphasis added]. . . . [Under Stalin], just as in the West,” he explains, “a tiny minority controlled the economy, exploiting the mass of the population with the aim of accumulating capital. Recognizing this fact is vital for understanding the crisis in the Soviet Union and the significance of recent events.” . . . CPUSA head Gus Hall is ashamed of Gorbachev for meekly protesting the current “McCarthyite witchhunt” against the Soviet Communist Party in the “while approving decrees carrying it out.” . . . National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer finds it reprehensible of Boris Yeltsin to have shut down Pravda temporarily because “that is flirting with censorship.” … To Soviets it seems much clearer. Aleksandr Goltz writes in the hard-line Red Army paper Red Star that “today it is evident that the Soviet Union, as a superpower possessed by messianic ideas, is finished.” He questions further whether what is left of the Soviet Union can even have a foreign policy. . . . TASS correspondent Aleksandr Manayev has confirmed that it was Soviet ground crews and pilots who shot down the first U.S. pilots over Vietnam in 1965, before North Vietnamese crews could be trained. . . . And the dominoes continue to tumble. In same week that Salvador peace was announced (what else could the rebels do when their supply lines from Nicaragua and Cuba were severed?), Washington Post ran front-page photograph of anti-Communist UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi campaigning in Luanda, Angola’s capital city.

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■ Two conclusions can be drawn from Clarence Thomas nomination: 1) it has fractured traditional black political leadership in America; 2) the confirmation process itself was mortally wounded by Judiciary Committee’s handling of Robert Bork. . . . Alan Keyes, the conservative black president of Citizens against Government Waste, says the confirmation battle heralds “the end of totalitarianism in the black community. One way or another this thing has broken it up.” … As evidence, Benjamin Hooks’s NAACP opposed Thomas, the National Urban League remained neutral, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—which Martin Luther King Jr. founded—came out in favor of confirmation. In endorsing Thomas, SCLC’s president Joseph Lowery said he doubted that Thomas “will march robotically to the beat of the right-wing drum corps.” And he took a swipe at Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for its Pavlovian rejection of Thomas. “The CBC,” Lowery says, “set themselves up as the voice of black America. They were rounding third base before the umpire said play ball.” . . . On the confirmation process, Sen. Slade Gorton (R., Wash.) pointed out in announcing his support of Thomas that “when a majority of the Judiciary Committee rejected Robert Bork, it condemned itself to a set of bland, inconclusive hearings like those on David Souter and Clarence Thomas. Knowing that a precise answer to a single question may cost the nominee any chance of confirmation, it is hardly surprising that all such questions are ducked.” . . . Katherine Franke, former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, came to much the same conclusion in the leftist Guardian. “Liberals,” she says, “remain stuck in the residual euphoria of the defeat of Robert Bork. Indeed, they act almost like deer, transfixed by oncoming headlights in the middle of a highway, ignorantly boasting: ‘Make my day, bring on another Bork.’ The nominees come and go, and the liberals don’t even know what hit them.” . . . Robert & Linda Lichter, whose Media Monitor polices media coverage of news events, reports the media were more hostile to Thomas than to Bork during the interval between nomination and start of Senate hearings. Three-fifths of the 337 evaluations of Thomas (New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN) were negative; coverage of Bork was evenly balanced between negative and positive assessments in same interval.

■ Hideous problem for the Left: How to survive collapse of Soviet Communism? Columnist Phil Gasper of radical Guardian says it is wrong to “see the collapse of Stalinism as somehow a setback for the Left. Why?” Because, he says, analysts on Left fail to realize that “the society that Stalin built on the ruins of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was simply a variant of capitalism [emphasis added]. . . . [Under Stalin], just as in the West,” he explains, “a tiny minority controlled the economy, exploiting the mass of the population with the aim of accumulating capital. Recognizing this fact is vital for understanding the crisis in the Soviet Union and the significance of recent events.” . . . CPUSA head Gus Hall is ashamed of Gorbachev for meekly protesting the current “McCarthyite witchhunt” against the Soviet Communist Party in the “while approving decrees carrying it out.” . . . National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer finds it reprehensible of Boris Yeltsin to have shut down Pravda temporarily because “that is flirting with censorship.” … To Soviets it seems much clearer. Aleksandr Goltz writes in the hard-line Red Army paper Red Star that “today it is evident that the Soviet Union, as a superpower possessed by messianic ideas, is finished.” He questions further whether what is left of the Soviet Union can even have a foreign policy. . . . TASS correspondent Aleksandr Manayev has confirmed that it was Soviet ground crews and pilots who shot down the first U.S. pilots over Vietnam in 1965, before North Vietnamese crews could be trained. . . . And the dominoes continue to tumble. In same week that Salvador peace was announced (what else could the rebels do when their supply lines from Nicaragua and Cuba were severed?), Washington Post ran front-page photograph of anti-Communist UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi campaigning in Luanda, Angola’s capital city.