The Congressional Black Caucus has told Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that he crossed the line earlier this month when he called Justice Clarence Thomas "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court."

"We wrote a letter to Sen. Reid cautioning him about his comments," incoming CBC Chairman Mel Watt, D-N.C., told radio host Steve Malzberg, who was filling in Wednesday on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" show. "I think all of us ought to focus more on substance and less on stereotypes and caricatures," Watt said.

Yall, I don't know what's going on, but I'm scared.  Watt actually defending Clarence Thomas?  Did I step into a portal leading into Bizzaro World and didn't realize it?

Also, James Taranto of Best of the Web did a bit of research in response to a follow-up question Reid was asked on CNN show "Inside Politics" on Dec 26th.  Here's how the question went:

Henry: When you were asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether or not you could support Justice Thomas to be chief justice you said quote, "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written." Could you name one of those opinions that you think is poorly written?

Reid: Oh sure, that's easy to do. You take the Hillside Dairy case. In that case you had a dissent written by Scalia and a dissent written by Thomas. There--it's like looking at an eighth-grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.

Scalia's is well reasoned. He doesn't want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head. That's what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he's written other opinions that are not very good.

Ignore the immature insult by Reid for a minute.  Taranto checked out Hillside Dairy, and found out that Scalia never wrote a dissent on the case.  Therefore, either Reid got the case wrong or he had no clue of what he was talking about.

And judge for yourself whether Thomas's opinion looks like an eighth-grade dissertation (and since when did eighth-graders write dissertations?):

I join Parts I and III of the Court's opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U.S.C. §7254, "does not clearly express an intent to insulate California's pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge." Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application," Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U.S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.

I've known eighth-graders who can't even read.  No eighth-grader I've known writes like this.

I'm not going to go as far as Taranto and others who say this is racial bigotry, but I will say Reid would not get away with such comments if it was aimed at a black leftist and not a conservative.  Allowing idiots like Greg Palast and Ted Rall to do it without any repercussions has opened the floodgates to others to make the same stereotypical insults that they would have never gotten away with had they been a Democrat.