Monday, February 27, 2012

It's All Politics, Baby

The Daily Caller floats a Clarence Thomas presidential run. Obviously, this is "clever, outside-the-box!" punditry at its most ridiculous. But my favorite part is the little bait and switch they do over Thomas' political position.

On the one hand, they use his judicial record to demonstrate how he'd energize conservatives with his "opposition to environmental regulation and his free market philosophy.... [and] that he’s against abortion, gay rights, and limits on prayer in school." On the other hand, when faced with the inevitability that Democrats will, you know, cream him over the radical positions he's taken on these issues, they retort that "Thomas has a trump card. Those were not statements of his personal political positions, he can say, but merely interpretations of the law." What a fabulous little rope-a-dope that would be!

The real irony is that, at least for some of the above positions, the latter may well be right. I have it on good authority, for instance, that as a matter of policy Thomas is pro-choice, and his "uncommonly silly" dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas indicates similar views about gay rights. Somehow, I think the right would be less excited about that.

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