Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
has given an interview. In it, we learn
things. Oh, the
things we learn.
Scalia was very sad about Watergate, and very sad that when he served in the resulting Ford administration the Ford administration had its collective fee-fees hurt:
It was a terrible time, not for the Republican Party, but for the presidency. It was such a wounded and enfeebled presidency, and Congress was just eating us alive. I mean, we had a president who had never been elected to anything except … what? A district in Michigan? Everything was in chaos.
He also goes on a bit on how "power tends to corrupt," and not a bit of it is self-referential. Not even when he cites when of his proudest moments as when he didn't recuse himself from a case everyone really thought he should probably recuse himself from, or when he says that it's gotten so much easier to decide cases today and that he was worried that it was a sign of him getting lazy, but then he realized it was just because he's been right for 27 years so this stuff really doesn't require any more thought.
He talks about which newspapers he reads, and how the Washington Post lost him because they are just so darn liberal:
I usually skim them. We just get The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. We used to get the Washington Post, but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore. […]
It was the treatment of almost any conservative issue. It was slanted and often nasty. And, you know, why should I get upset every morning? I don’t think I’m the only one. I think they lost subscriptions partly because they became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.
I know whenever
I look at the
Washington Post editorial page, I say golly gee, this is so darn liberal. If it weren't for Charles Krauthammer we wouldn't have anyone suggesting we use orphans as kindling
at all.
More deep thoughts from Justice Scalia below the fold.
He is "nervous about our civic culture":
You can’t go to a movie—or watch a television show for that matter—without hearing the constant use of the F-word—including, you know, ladies using it.
He seems most animated by his thoughts on the Devil:
I even believe in the Devil. […] Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.
You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.
There's more, but none of it is terribly enlightening. Yes, Mr. Scalia is a hard-right man pushing for a hard-right nation because the hard-right Constitution says screw you, that's why, and these kids today with their Facebooks and f-bombs and the lack of pigs flying off cliffs and I don't know if anyone but me has noticed this but it is existentially depressing to realize that all of human civilization relies on actual humans running that civilization without screwing it up and that just seems like a profound oversight, it really does, though building robots to do it instead would probably result in more than a few problems itself.
