RIGHT OF CENTER: HILL IS STRANGE CHOICE TO HONOR KING

On Monday this nation will celebrate the birthday of one of the its great citizens: slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The Rev. King's legacy is that he, more than any single person, was able to persuade America that institutionalized racism and segregation must end.

Above all, King was a meek man. Not weak and effete as meek often is misconstrued today, but meek in its true meaning of strength in control. It is fitting to honor a man who helped set the standard for nonviolent civil disobedience.

Dr. King urged all Americans -- black and white -- to judge each other on the basis of character, not skin color. In that spirit, why would organizers of the local King commemoration invite Anita Hill to address the annual King Memorial Breakfast Buffet on Monday at Southeast Missouri State University? Hill is a woman of marginal accomplishments save for her anointment by the liberal feminist fringe as the sexual harassment poster girl.

I assume she will talk about King's dream for a society where all Americans, regardless of their ethnic and racial heritage, get a fair shake. Presumably, she won't discuss the circumstances that enable her to command $10,000 a pop for such speaking engagements as Monday's.

Those circumstances, of course, are the shameful confirmation hearings in 1991 of then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who was confirmed to the court despite his unwarranted humiliation at the hands of his former coworker Hill and her ilk on the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the national media.

In defense of Hill, she was set up by Democratic committee members and their staffers bent on a political lynching of Thomas, a black conservative. They convinced Hill that the anonymous charge of sexual harassment would be enough to sink the nomination. When it wasn't, they called Professor Hill before the nation to make her scurrilous charges.

There is little doubt, based on the reams of research that has been done on both sides of the controversy, that Hill's charges that Thomas sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at a federal agency is a deceit of vivid proportion. The extent to which the harassment charge has been propagated in the media has transformed Anita Hill's story into an outrageous hoax. When freelance reporter and author David Brock published "The Real Anita Hill," which revealed damning inconsistencies in Hill's testimony for the judiciary committee and in the testimony of her supporting witnesses, the writer faced swift censure from the left.

But smearing Brock wasn't enough. Apparently his in-depth research shot too many holes in Hill's story. To counter the book, two Wall Street Journal reporters, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, co-wrote "Strange Justice." Hailed by the liberal press as Hill's vindication, the book garnered accolades from reviewers who either didn't bother to read it or were too lazy or ideologically predisposed to notice its flaws.

In the January issue of The American Spectator, a conservative magazine for which he regularly contributes articles, Brock painstakingly dismantles the assertions in "Strange Justice," while exposing the shoddy reporting that hatched the book. From Mayer's and Abramson's sources who say they were misquoted to others who deny even talking to the women, Brock presents his best case yet that Hill and her advocates are frauds. Near the end of the 22-page Spectator article, Brock identifies several factual mistakes in the book that have little to do with the core harassment charge but have a lot to do with the credibility of the writers' research. A footnote to the book's epilogue even cites an article in the Spectator, although no such article appeared, nor was there even a Spectator issue bearing the date cited in the note.

Unfortunately, the national media bought Mayer and Abramson's bill of goods and promoted the lies in "Strange Justice" in print and on such TV shows as ABC's "Turning Point" and "Nightline."

So what is Hill, of dubious veracity, doing as the keynote speaker at the city's commemoration of King? Here we have a lightweight bureaucrat and mediocre journeyman college professor whose sole claim to fame is her lewd and uncorroborated accusations against a black Supreme Court justice. Is this someone whom black Americans ought to look up to as the embodiment of King's dream? If not, what can she possibly add to an event held in honor of King's legacy and the hope it inspires? Very little, I'm afraid.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.