I’m a little torn about posting this because I try to avoid politics or Bad News here, and this is both. But if I don’t post it here, there’s some people who should read it who never will see it.
Jeffrey Toobin, writing in The New Yorker, may have finally demystified Clarence Thomas for me, which is quite a feat. It doesn’t change the fact that I disagree with the man’s positions or find him a travesty, but it does at least give him some internal consistency and a new respect for his intelligence. I still think he does the math and arrives at the wrong answers (particularly on issues of race), but at least now I can see his work.
It also has convinced me to stop thinking of Thomas as a laughingstock and begin thinking of him as very dangerous - the stealth Tea Partier on the Court, whose positions are now one of the greatest influences on the Court’s majorities. Read the article and perhaps you, too, will agree.