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...
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...
4 comments:
He coulda been an archbishop.
Also, Justice Douglas was an independent Westerner who stood for basic human and civil rights whereas Scalia has always been an arrogant pretender to read the Founders' minds (originalism) and has always been a faithful corporatist. He is not even remotely comparable to Douglas.
I'd have thought at some point Scalia might've thought that citing the practices of slaveholding states as supporting his position might render it at least a wee bit less palatable... but no. In for a penny, in for a pound.
scalia as douglas -- no way. scalia yeah as an archbishop but about when elizabeth succeeded mary
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