“Antonin Scalia, like Newt Gingrich, is a RW ideologue who thinks he’s smarter than anyone else and so is infallible. He’s a buffoon who takes himself way too seriously.”

And folks like that are dangerous in the long run. Just saying.

Funny enough, you can apply that to Glenn Greenwald….

When he clerked for Justice Stevens at the SC, my younger brother used to tell some rather….interesting stories about Scalia.

And Bush v. Gore should have been the ultimate wake-up call to the “both parties are the same” blabbers. It showed that yes, it does freaking matter who sits on the bench and that what they do and what they decide has consequences for everyone. Forget this at your own peril.

Exactly. They sure as hell didn’t care back in 2000. I remember some jerk on Democracy Now! arguing how the SC was, get this, a “scare tactic used by Democrats”.

Well, we sure found out the hard way that it wasn’t true, I guess.

(I wish I could remember the dude’s name….but what he said stayed stuck in my mind.)

Point taken.

–alopecia

I don’t know if I ever bought into the notion that Antonin Scalia was an intellectual, but I did hope that being a Supreme Court justice would temper his ideological rigidity. If anything, he’s become even more rigid—and, as you rightly point out, cynical—in his thinking.

Paul Krugman last year alluded to someone (I don’t know who, and if anyone does, please enlighten me) describing Newt Gingrich as “a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like,” a description that fits Scalia equally well.

–alopecia

“Antonin Scalia is a fraud.”

More accurate.

Why would they have done that? They knew it was perfect and should be used to ensure that future Americans would conform to their behavioural norms.

The remarkable thing is that even though the founders were all radicals who overthrew the established order, as well as being individuals who argued amongst themselves on most topics, they all just happened to all think exactly alike, and miraculously, what they thought was exactly what Scalia, a late twentieth century conservative, and defender of the status quo thinks.

“Antonin Scalia is an intellectual fraud.”

I feel exactly the same way as you do. I had bought into the meme that Scalia was an intellectual who favored Conservative interpretation of the Constitution. What woke me up was the stance he took during the 2000 Florida vote recount. Of all the Justices, Scalia was the most politically driven. He had absolutely no shame in making sure that the court ruled in favor of George W.Bush. He was even so cynical to invoke the 14th Amendment, which he had routinely trashed in other cases, to justify ruling in favor of Bush and stopping recounts. For me, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore made me lose faith in the impartiality of right wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.