Kathleen Parker

I've kept an open mind about Kathleen Parker because sometimes she seemed to strike a moderate note and on the whole seemed reasonable for a conservative commentator.

But her thoughtless, insensitive and stupid column on Anita Hill has pretty much destroyed her credibility for me.

Parker writes: "She may have told the truth, but so what?" So what???

So much wrong with this column, it's hard to know where to begin. The tagline, "Let's hope Clarence Thomas has enough faith to survive his second lynching -- and to forgive poor Ginni." Poor Clarence.

This gem: "You see, to be scandalized, one must be deeply sensitive to the mention of anything sexual." Can she truly be so sheltered coming from her farm in South Carolina or wherever it was she was observing the world that she doesn't understand when you cross the line between off-color remarks and sexual harassment? Or is she really just astonishingly stupid? This rivals the naivete (and hypocrisy?) of some of Christine O'Donnell's remarks on chastity and abstinence.

Thankfully, Ruth Marcus, God bless her heart, stepped in and said what needed to be said. After recounting Hill's anguished narration, Marcus, who covered the hearings at the time, said, "If this sounds like a 'so what' situation to you, please explain what your reaction would be if you found your wife, your daughter -- or yourself -- in this predicament."

Plus, if, as Parker does, you concede that Hill might have been telling the truth, then Thomas perjured himself. "To acknowledge that Hill may have told the truth is to accept that Thomas may have lied -- repeatedly and under oath. If Hill testified truthfully, Thomas committed perjury. And this seems, even now, like a pretty big so what."

It's always seemed to me that this is a no-brainer. Anita Hill had no reason to take the stand and lie, whereas Clarence Thomas had every reason to lie.

I haven't yet seen the new Parker-Spitzer show on CNN, though I've been meaning to watch it because I think Eliot Spitzer is a smart guy (in some respects). But if Parker is as vapid as this column indicates, I'm not sure I could stand to watch her.