In the days before Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1991, he was known chiefly as a black conservative who didn't support affirmative action. That his actual legal and judicial record otherwise yielded slim pickings was also known, and was indeed the whole point: The country had recently embarked on an era in which court nominees (and their backers) were terrified of a newly coined term - a verb that in common usage took the past participle, "borked." The term nowadays implies a vicious campaign to discredit a nominee before and during the confirmation process, but more particularly - as...