Facts are stupid things... Ronald Reagan
Since the rise of Ronald Reagan to national political prominence there has been one ideological trait that best defines the GOP and modern conservatism - they are divorced from reality. This malady has now reached the Supreme Court, where Justice Antonin Scalia, the product of a Jesuit education, has betrayed that order's tradition of a continual search for truth by his acceptance of outdated and biased information - and even urban legend - as fact.
Antonin Scalia may have once passed the bar exam, but he can't gain admittance to the reality-based community. Here's why:
In case you've forgotten, it was Ron Suskind, reporting in the NY Times, who provided the genesis for the "Proud member of the reality-based community" label many of us wear:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
We've seen over and over again the this administration's disdain for facts; routinely censoring government scientists or forcing them to rewrite reports to fit Bush's political ideology. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was one of the first Bush insiders to sound the alarm about Bush’s hostility toward reality. O’Neill described a host of administration policies – from Bush’s "preemptive wars" to the budget deficit – that "were impenetrable by facts."
It wouldn't be breaking any new ground to say politicians lie, or politicians tell half-truths, or politicians are often misinformed or ignorant of the facts. It's not the occasional misleading use or denial of facts that's the issue here, it's the denial of facts as the underlying basis of nearly every decision.
And it's not just conservative politicians, we now see judges using this same tactic - and not just any judge, but the conservative's poster boy for logic and intellect - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Here's Justice Scalia from BOUMEDIENE v. BUSH
The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.
Fact: To the best of our knowledge, not a single American has been killed by any of the hundreds of 'enemy combatants' released from U.S. detention. Zero, nada, zilch. Scalia must have borrowed Karl Rove's "The Math" to extrapolate from zero to some unknown, but terrible number greater than zero.
Scalia continues:
In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating.
At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.
This is really unfathomable. Scalia is using here as basis for his minority decision an outdated DOD press release. Statistics in that release have been revised in the past couple years at least twice. And like everything else this administration spews out it's about as biased as you can imagine. Returning to the battlefield? The DOD considers former detainees talking to reporters as a 'hostile act' - and thus they have returned to the battlefield.
Markos covered Scalia's use of detainee release statistics in his post Scalia or wingnut blogger? This man sits on the Supreme Court .... it just makes you want to curl up and cry ....
Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident. While most Supreme Court judges are rather reticent and we don't generally get to hear many of their personal views, Scalia has offered up plenty of interviews - and they tell us alot about him.
Visiting the UK while peddling his book, Making the Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, Scalia opined on the 2000 election. StuHunter gives us a quick rundown in his diary It's All Gore's Fault.
What caught my attention was this paragraph
"Richard Nixon, when he lost to [John F.] Kennedy thought that the election had been stolen in Chicago, which was very likely true with the system at the time," Justice Antonin Scalia told The Telegraph.
This is urban legend. A pernicious one believed by many conservatives.
FACT: even if Nixon carried Illinois, the state alone would not have given him the victory, as Kennedy would still have won 276 electoral votes to Nixon's 246 (with 269 needed to win).
So, Scalia has not only bought into the urban legend, he's using it as rationalization for his ridiculous decision in the 2000 election.
Antonin Scalia has failed his admittance test to the reality-based community ... and I cringe to contemplate what other "facts" might be rolling around in his head ...