Keep the blame on the abuser, not the clueless non-abusing men who might not eagerly join you at the ramparts:

Joe Biden doesn’t owe me an apology. Clarence Thomas does.

Op-ed by Angela Wright-Shannon @ WashingtonPost.com, May 1

[....] as “the uncalled witness” in the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, I believe we have more pressing issues than whether Biden has sufficiently apologized for what did or did not happen almost three decades ago.

Let’s get our priorities straight [....]

As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee 28 years ago, Biden performed poorly; his lack of support for Hill was appalling. Hill says Biden promised her that she would be allowed to testify first. Everyone knows now that didn’t happen, a turn that allowed Thomas to frame the hearings to his advantage. Biden could have done more — or at least tried — to moderate the heartless grilling of Hill by his Senate colleagues. He could have called me to speak to Thomas’s behavior, thus backing Hill’s testimony. Yet he chose not to. For Hill, Biden was about as useful as an umbrella to a skydiver.

But let’s keep things in perspective. The Thomas hearings were extraordinary for any number of reasons. Hard as it might be to imagine now, there was no national conversation about sexual harassment before the hearings. Secondly, the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 had not the first clue about how to handle the accusations of a clearly accomplished, reputable, African American female law professor against an equally accomplished, African American male appeals court judge. Sensing the senators’ unease, Thomas played his race card in his opening remarks, declaring that the hearings were nothing more than “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”

And, with that, he managed to neutralize any white man on the committee who dared to oppose him, turning the debate from one of sexual harassment into one of racist politics. By linking questions about his sexual behavior to his race and labeling it a lynching, Thomas put every man on that panel on the defensive. I understand why Biden turned into a prattling, ineffectual lump of nothingness. I don’t excuse it, but I do understand [....]