WHAT DO WE say now? I told you so?

It has been nearly 10 years since Anita Hill was called from her Oklahoma campus to testify on Clarence Thomas's
nomination to the Supreme Court. It has been nearly a decade since those hearings set off a stunning national furor
about sexual harassment, about what he said and she said.

Had Thomas, the former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, trod on a woman's rights?
Had he harassed her with porn talk? Was she out to get him? A tease? A tramp?

The whole country, glued to the television, seemed to divide into right and left or male and female asking:
Who was the victim and who was the liar? Was Thomas subject to ''a high-tech lynching''?
Was Hill the target of a White House smear campaign?

Thomas won confirmation by a bare two votes, but the case never really closed. It was argued in kitchens and in print.

In the aftermath, writer David Brock became the chief partisan of the right, building up his reputation by tearing down
Hill as ''a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.'' In his vitriolic book ''The Real Anita Hill,'' the writer stripped the clothes
off her character, describing her as incompetent, unstable, even kinky.

Now the ''Honk if You Believe Anita'' bumper stickers are gone. Justice Thomas is on the court, with mud clinging
to the hem of his robe. Professor Hill is at Brandeis, the reluctant Rosa Parks of harassment.

And David Brock has recanted.

''A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty''? This recovering hit man confesses in an upcoming Talk magazine article
and in a new book that he was on a search-and-destroy-Anita mission.

He says he printed charges he knew were false, ''dumping virtually every derogatory - and often contradictory
- allegation I had collected on Hill into the vituperative mix.'' He falsely trashed evidence that Thomas had been
a good customer of porno videos and falsely trashed Hill's supporters.

So do we say, ''I told you so'' to those who believed what they read? Do we tell the man from Santa Fe whose
recent review on Amazon.com calls Brock's book ''solidly researched'' to try again? Do we recycle the copies
of his out-of-print falsehoods?

I do not offer Brock absolution. The man who made a bestseller out of a defamatory rant now wants to make
a bestseller out of repentance. What's his next gig, ''My Life as an Opportunist''? If his old allies accuse him
of lying about lying, he deserves that. He did too much damage.

But Brock was just the righthand scribe, the mop-up crew after the nomination was cinched. I'd rather hear a
mea culpa from Orrin Hatch, who said Thomas couldn't possibly have taunted his employee with porn talk.
Why, he would have been a ''psychopathic sex fiend or a pervert.'' I'd rather have repentance of John Danforth,
the senator who sang ''Onward Christian Soldiers'' with Thomas in the bathroom before the hearings.
What do they think now?

In ''Strange Justice,'' a book that Brock savaged before his reformation, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote
that the ''preponderance of the evidence suggests'' that Justice Thomas ''did lie under oath.'' The senators gave
Thomas much more than the benefit of the doubt; they gave him a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.

When Charles Ogletree, an attorney for Hill, heard about Brock's confession, he cut to the chase, or rather to
the record.  ''We knew we were unfairly maligned and that he would be an ideologue of extreme proportions.''
Indeed, Thomas's record has been one long attack on prisoners' rights and women's rights and civil rights and,
of course, sexual harassment.

''It's been a tough decade for the civil rights community to have the African-American who replaced Justice Marshall
repudiate everything Marshall stood for,'' says Ogletree. That's the real legacy.

Nearly 10 years have passed. Many senators still regard those hearings as the ultimate confirmation nightmare.
The chance of sequel prompts the calls to avoid ''politics'' or ''incivility'' or ''personal attacks'' in passing judgment
on new judges. But the real penitence is due from those senators who confirmed Clarence Thomas in haste,
leaving us to repent in leisure.

Justice Thomas was 43 years old when he was confirmed. He told his friends he'd stay on the bench 43 more years
because it would take that long to get even. That's 33 to go.