If you’re like most Americans, you’re busy. There are news stories you miss. If you have a few, though, take in a little of this week or so with not just the talking heads, but the United States Senate.

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Radio talk-show institution Rush Limbaugh has been attacked for over a week now for daring to talk about “phony soldiers” — that is, people who pretend to be American servicemen, but who are not.

Democrats Harry Reid and Tom Harkin attacked him on the United States Senate floor — in personal and disgraceful terms. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack I-Won’t-Wear-the-Red-White-and-Blue Obama signed their names to a letter to his radio show’s distributor calling for his cancellation.

Coincidentally or not, during the same week as the Rush attackfest, Washington was remembering another Senate disgrace. On October 1, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas released his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. In response to a book that is largely about his grandfather’s influence on his life, Anita Hill—Thomas’s former colleague who accused him of sexual harassment during his Senate confirmation hearings two decades ago—was back in the New York Times, standing by her contentions.

If you read his book or talk to him, as I did Monday, you know that Justice Thomas isn’t interested in attacking Anita Hill or getting revenge. In writing the book, he just wanted to set the record of the story of his life straight — in large part because he had vowed that he would live his life as a memorial to his grandparents who raised him.

He writes about those awful confirmation hearings: “My enemies weren’t looking for open-minded justices. All they cared about was keeping anyone off the Supreme Court who might possibly vote to reverse Roe or water it down.” In an interview on the book’s publication day, Justice Thomas told me Hill was but a “weapon of choice” of special interests who wanted to defeat him. He says they’re the same people who killed Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 for the same reason, making his name a verb.

In a phone conversation with me from his chambers, Justice Thomas bemoaned a “process [that] has become very damaging. It’s damaging to the accuser. It’s damaging to the accused. It’s damaging to the institution. It’s damaging to society.”

Though he is immensely grateful for the “modest role” he gets to play in our nation’s history as a judge sitting on the bench of our highest court, Justice Thomas is immensely grateful and humbled. But he also told me, “I don’t like politics.”

Could you blame him? As we relive the smearing of Thomas and listen to lies about Limbaugh, do you?

Of course, politics can be — and so often are — better than all that. And, gratefully, good men and women who love truth are willing to be in public life despite how ugly and unjust it can get. But before you dismiss it all as talkers talking, get a little outraged at Harry Reid and Tom Harkin. Because no American should be lied about on the Senate floor — nevermind one with an accomplished record of service to our bravest. And no name should ever be made a verb again by what Thomas calls a “hijacked” process.