Scalia Hears Footsteps

Professor/polemicist Paul Campos (what kind of name is Campos, anyway?) thinks immigrant-child Antonin Scalia has turned into a ranting old man--"an increasingly intolerant and intolerable blowhard: a pompous celebrant of his own virtue and rectitude, a purveyor of intemperate jeremiads against the degeneracy of the age, and now an author of hysterical diatribes against foreign invaders, who threaten all that is holy."  Campos says Scalia in his "immense arrogance and creeping decrepitude" brings to mind  nobody so much as William O. Douglas.   One thing they share, I suppose: they grow older and face the horror of their growing irrelevance.  They hear footsteps.

Well, comparisons like this are never perfect and this one is okay (although Douglas' vices did not include so much visible bluster).  But I offer  better: Scalia's connazionale Fiorello La Guardia--another short, energetic, explosive headline-grabber, in his time the delight of his fan club, who grew increasingly rancid and inflexible as he drifted into irrelevance and old age.   If only we'd quit admitting these people who don't share our values...