Affirmative action and hypocrisy?

In a post about affirmative action in an episode of Ugly Betty, Angela Onwuachi-Willig can't resist taking a pot-shot at Clarence Thomas:

Yet we should fear renewed criticism of affirmative action laws, now by minorities who deserve its benefits but refuse them as a sign of moral character. This isn’t Clarence Thomas, who benefited from affirmative action and then criticized it. His hypocrisy discredited his arguments.

This is wrong on three counts. First, there's nothing hypocritical about benefitting from affirmative action and subsequently criticizing it. A person may sincerely believe that affirmative action is bad, and yet decide that it's not worth unilaterally rejecting the personal benefits it offers. This is especially true in the case of Thomas, who has received not only the personal benefits associated with a seat on the Supreme Court, but also the ability to shape policy, including policy on affirmative action, for the better.

Second, even if we were to grant for the sake of argument Thomas's hyporcisy, that wouldn't discredit his arguments, any more than leftists' failure to return their share of the Bush tax cuts discredits their arguments against it. Failure to live up to an ideal is not a logical refutation of its validity. A professor of law should know better than to commit such a basic fallacy.

Finally, one of the most compelling arguments against affirmative action is that it causes people to question the qualifications of those who may have benefitted from it. In fact, Thomas himself has said that prospective employers questioned the validity of his Yale Law degree because of affirmative action, and this may have contributed to his opposition to it. And here Onwuachi-Willig is affirming the legitimacy of that argument by implying* that Thomas would not be in his current position under race-neutral policies.