Bully on the Bench: Scalia’s Crimes Against Justice
April 8, 2016
Bully on the Bench: Scalias Crimes Against Justice
by Jeffrey St. Clair
The mythologizing of Antonin Scalia began only a few hours after his leathery heart stopped beating in West Texas and Satan swept his soul to the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where corrupt barrators are imprisoned for eternity. Here, strapped to a sparking electric chair, Scalias torments will be supervised by the demon Malacoda, who, Dante informs us, regularly makes a trumpet of his ass.
There was something of an uproar over the lack of an autopsy for Scalias ravaged body. Quick-draw conspiracists alleged the portly associate justice was murdered to give Obama a chance to realign the Supreme Court. These creative thinkers seem not to have paid much attention to the bleak presence of Elena Kagan on the bench. Theres no mystery about Scalias death. A three- pack a day man for most of his life, Scalia was clearly offed by his friends in the tobacco industry, whose murderous enterprise he zealously guarded in his legal opinions. And they say theres no justice.
Its not Scalias corpse that needed dissecting, but the true nature and quality of his jurisprudence. From the Weekly Standard to the Washington Post, Scalia was lionized as a titanic legal thinker, who possessed a blistering prose style and a wit worthy of Swift. Even more bizarrely, the praise for Scalias alleged brilliance was advanced by Beltway liberals, such as former Obama White House counsel Cass Sunstein (spouse of the odious Samantha Power) who asserted that Scalia was witty, warm, funny and full of life. He was not only one of the most important justices in the nations history; he was also one of the greatest. This curious assessment would have surprised former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who for years sternly refused to assign any major court ruling to Scalia because he feared Scalias mad legal theories and nasty prose style would undermine the standing of the court.
None of these attributes stand scrutiny. Any sober assessment of Scalias legal writing would find them incoherent, contradictory and at times bordering on the pathological. In other words, he was a crank and bully, who was more than willing to consign a man to death row even when facts proved his innocence. In 2002, Scalia morbidly boasted about being part of the machinery of death.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/08/bully-on-the-bench-scalias-crimes-against-justice/
2naSalit
(86,765 posts)I haven't missed the asshole.
DesertFlower
(11,649 posts)Surya Gayatri
(15,445 posts)He wanted to be famous, but infamous will have to do.
John1956PA
(2,656 posts)Last edited Mon Apr 11, 2016, 02:25 PM - Edit history (1)
A 2014 article from the Huffington Post:
A North Carolina death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence on Tuesday was once held up by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of someone who deserved to die.
. . .
more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/scalia-death-penalty_n_5756362.html
Judi Lynn
(160,598 posts)47of74
(18,470 posts)All these attempts by the GOP to turn him in to the greatest thing since sliced bread and Jesus Christ turn my stomach.
Paladin
(28,271 posts)The harm he did from the bench will negatively impact the lives of generations to come. A genuinely evil man.