Scalia to Constitution: Vaffanculo

I'm really beginning to wonder if Scalia is beginning to manifest some sort of serious, organic cognitive problem. There was the episode -- in church -- when he flipped off a reporter.



And now there is this:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says refusing to recuse himself in a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney is the "proudest thing" he's done on the court. Critics questioned Scalia's impartiality in the 2004 case upholding Cheney's request to keep the details of secret White House strategy sessions private — after Scalia took a hunting trip with the vice president just weeks after the court agreed to hear the case.But Scalia tells law students at the University of Connecticut that he's proud he didn't allow himself to be chased off the case, saying, "For Pete's sake, if you can't trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life."

This is an amazingly concentrated dose of pathology, even for Scalia. First, for a guy reputed to be very bright and a legal scholar, his sentence construction is surprisingly childlike and ignorant. "Proudest thing" is just plain wrong -- the thing isn't proud, Nino; you might be proud of it, but I assure you, it ain't proud of you, and couldn't be even if what you did was something to be proud of. Dubya's syntax is so utterly bolluxed 24/7 that I would never bother to correct him this way, but Justice Scalia normally meets a higher standard.

But that's not the worst of it. Think about how Earl Warren might have answered the question -- would his proudest moment be ending legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Ed? Establishing the right of an indigent criminal defendent to a public defender? Now as a sworn enemy of all things progressive, Scalia would not be expected to have that brand of nostalgia. But he has been party to many conservative milestones -- do none of them rate higher than covering the Dick's butt? There is something pathetic and alarmingly regressive in placing the protection of your playground pal above the big picture stuff.

And finally, the idea that we are supposed to trust our high government officals to police themselves is so absurdly at odds with the express intent of the guys who designed and built our system that a so-called strict constructionist like Scalia should be incapable of even uttering the words.

Scalia is now 70 years old. So I have to ask: is he beginning to lose it?



Perhaps Dr. Bloor, if he still haunts these parts, could favor us with a more professional diagnosis.