Heard on NPR with the BBC’s Clive Coleman. You had to have heard the tone of contempt in Scalia’s soft voice for the questioner. It was chilling:
You can’t come in smugly and with great satisfaction say it’s torture …. I am interpreting the text of my Constitution…
Anybody who calls bullshit on Scalia is “self-righteous.”
I think Scalia’s been watching 24 too much. In common with the rest of the torture advocates in the Beltway, they are pro-torture because “they like to watch.”
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Excuse me?
Your Constitution, Mr. Scalia? When did it become your personal property?
Or is it just that you’re using a different Constitution from the rest of us?
Had me sputtering with rage on my commute this morning.
Until I had just had too much and switched over to the Neko Case album, anyhow.
I said it would have good old Ollie W. turning in his grave, but I hardly mean to suggest it’s just him — mainly, I think he has a cool name. Really, I think the claim, which as you and CD note Scalia has been implicitly making for a while now, that the actions of fictional characters in (at best) middlebrow mass entertainment products form a sound basis for jurisprudence, has produced an entire chorus line of horizontally pirouetting black-robed corpses.
(In a bitterly amusing twist, I’m informed by a friend who has actually watched the relevant parts of the show that on 24 Jack Bauer was in fact put on trial, convicted, and sent to jail for torturing someone. So yes, Justice
Scalia, I guess a jury — every bit as real as your fantasy ticking-time-bomb scenarios — is going to convict Jack Bauer.)