“What was she thinking?”

That’s the question being asked around some water coolers this morning, or would be if people had jobs to go to or companies that weren’t too cheap to have water coolers, or water in them when employees gathered ’round. The she in question,of course, is Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who left a message for Anita Hill on her office voice mail, suggesting she apologize for all those nasty things she said about Clarence at his confirmation hearings.

You know, that stuff about the justice hassling Hill when they worked together at the Department of Education. Like the time he said he in her presence, “Who put this pubic hair on my can of Coke?” (an image that sent Coke sales into the toilet, so to speak, for years) It was big news at the time — much of the US stopped what it was doing to watch those hearings, and it arguably changed our understanding of sexual harassment in the workplace forever.

But Thomas was confirmed and has been just the sort of rubber stamp for Scalia people feared he would, so you would think he won, right? But we know from reports that he still broods about his “electronic lynching” and so, it seems, does Mrs. Thomas. She asked an apology of Anita Hill before, it seems, who said she has nothing to apologize for — just Speaking Truth to Power, as the title of her book put it. “Virginia Hill and I have never met,” she wrote. “And one can imagine that she is guided by her own romantic interest in her husband when she assumes that other women find him attractive as well.”

Meow. What is even weirder about Ginni Thomas’s action though is the attention it calls to her at the very moment when people are starting to question the propriety of a Supreme Court justice’s wife making a nice salary from undisclosed donors for calling the sitting president a tyrant and spouting other Tea Party nonsense. At 7:30 AM no less! Sounds like someone needs to switch to decaf. Or Coke zero.