THOMAS PICK: ;YOU READ IT HERE FIRST, 18 MONTHS AGO

Senators Edward Kennedy and Joe Biden and cohorts seem fully prepared to perform their patented lynching number on the Supreme Court nominee President Bush has sent to the Senate. This brings to mind a column I wrote for this newspaper some 18 months ago. Many of those comments retain their relevance today.

Let's revisit "Plantation beckons: Who is next for Joe Biden to lynch?", first published here January 25, 1990.

This is a story about a Big House, and the Liberal Plantation, and the Massas and overseers who run things up on the Hill.

The Liberal Plantation is headquartered in the Big House up on Capitol Hill. From there the plantation masters Senators such as Massa Kennedy, Massa Biden, and Massa Metzenbaum control their subjects.

Over the last 25 years an elaborate, multi-billion dollar aparatus has been built up, allegedly to "help" those subjects. Whatever its intended purpose, its real effect is to keep them in utter dependency. That's the status that so pleases and suits their masters and the vast compassion industry created to minister to the subjects' needs. The slavery that existed under force of law during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was America's shame, to be sure. Its legacy still hurts, and hurts badly. Still, that tragic legacy could hardly be more degrading than the state of dependency foisted on Black America during this century through the Liberal Plantation, by their Massas in the Big House up on the Hill.

But now, those Massas and their plantation overseers face a new problem. Some former slaves on the Liberal Plantation are getting uppity, way too uppity, and they're doing a very, very dangerous and revolutionary thing: Their own thinking.

One such uppity man is 41-year-old Clarence Thomas. This writer is personally acquainted with him, as we first met during the 1970s while he was working in Jack Danforth's Attorney General office. We became further acquainted in 1981, when both of us were at work trying to reform things around the Big House on the Hill, he, again, in Sen. Danforth's employ.

Thomas was born into grinding poverty in the old South of Jim Crow laws and segregated lunch counters. He grew up in that American apartheid before working his way through Holy Cross and the Yale Law School, where he came to despise what he calls "the racism of sympathy." After long service as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Reagan, last year President Bush nominated him to fill Robert Bork's old vacancy on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He faces Senate confirmation hearings set to begin shortly.

So impressive is the Clarence Thomas resume; so compelling are his principled, color-blind arguments; so well so American is his appeal, that he is clearly marked for greatness. It is widely thought that after service on the Court of Appeals, he would be first in line for a Bush appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court when Thurgood Marshall (its first-ever black justice, age 82), dies or is incapacitated. Perhaps (one hopes) even before such an event, if a vacancy should occur sooner.

For Massas Biden, Kennedy, and Metzenbaum, Thomas is sufficiently uppity that he simply cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. Because, you see, he could rip away the veil that hides the Plantation, the Massas, and all their overseers, thereby exposing their massive fraud for the scam that it is.

And that explains why Clarence Thomas, a strong intellect, a formidably articulate, selfless and distinguished public servant without the slightest breath of any taint or scandal, is next in line to tumble down the left-wing rabbit hole on the Hill up at the Big House, a miserable little hole also known as the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. That hole up at the Big House is where Chairman Massa Biden holds forth with Massa Kennedy as resident moral exemplars and guardians of the Plantation tablets.

Foremost among the commandments on Massa Biden's tablets is the one that says:

"Thou shalt think only liberal thoughts and follow none but approved liberal policies, and thou shalt have no other masters before us."

You see, nothing is as threatening to their continued dominance of the Liberal Plantation as a brilliant and courageous black in public life, a man who dares to think for himself, and whose fair-minded thinking leads him to repudiate the corrupt, oppressive, smelly little orthodoxies of the Liberal Plantation. And an articulate, principled, moderate, black conservative such as Clarence Thomas is the most threatening of all.

It will be interesting to see whether Massa Biden and the Plantation crowd have the stomach to really do their full lynching number here. By that I mean the kind of all-out sleaze, the thoroughly disgraceful job that characterized their hearings on Robert Bork: the intentional distortions, the blatant intellectual dishonesty, the shrill personal attacks, the national hysteria campaign, the witness intimidation, the demagoguery, the lies. Are they now prepared for the Bork-ing of a black man of Clarence Thomas's background, intellect, and moral integrity?

And that isn't all that will be interesting. This one is a wake-up call for George Bush and for his men. Will the Bush White House fight for its man I mean really fight for him, with convincing passion and a real, active, take-it-to-'em strategy for battle the way the Reagan White House should have fought for Robert Bork, and by which they might have prevailed if they had?

Stay tuned. This time the Plantation crowd, busily preparing their next lynching, may just have met their match in Clarence Thomas.