I'm not going to pretend for one second that I'm not thrilled this crooked monster is dead. And he was a monster - whatever rationalizations he and others offered over the years, Scalia's raison d'etre was always an opposition to all possible joy and happiness in human life.
Much is already being written on Scalia's influence on jurisprudence or his philosophy of the Rule of Law and it's all absolute bullshit. These are words Scalia used to justify his own petty malice: from anointing George W. Bush president in 2000 to dithering over hypothetical federal broccoli mandates, his motivations have always been to cause the most harm to the most people. Whether his monstrousness was a means to self-validation or just an end in itself is a question left to historians but the results are all too apparent.
Imagine how many people would still be alive if George W. Bush was not president on September 11th, 2001. Imagine how many countries would not be invaded, how the surveillance state and a unitary executive might still remain in the realm of the theoretical. Imagine an electorate that wouldn't have spent the past decade soaking in that poshlost which has now made Donald Trump a viable candidate for Commander in Chief of the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
And that's just one decision! Drill down into Scalia's history on the Supreme Court and you find not just a contempt for the rule of law when it conflicts with his own limited interests, but an actual hostility to anyone not blessed with inherited wealth or the conscience of a used car salesman. His dissents on everything from marriage equality to race relations to state executions shows not a reasoned or even reasonable approach to jurisprudence but rather a bitterness that others might find peace in this world, rather than suffer from birth to death.
Even Clarence Thomas found him unconscionably cruel: "He loves killing unarmed animals."
In this, Scalia followed his patron Reagan. Often credited with making Americans feel good about themselves, if impoverishing them for a generation, Cowboy Ronnie famously opposed everything from public education to trees not for any nuanced philosophical reason, but for a simple disdain of anything good and beautiful. And in keeping with that anti-life maxim, Scalia's last act before returning to Hell was to accelerate Climate Change.
Obama can nominate the blandest, most middle-of-the-road twerp to fill Scalia's place and it won't matter. Scalia himself was such a blight on humanity that his death alone is more liberating than a dozen Supreme Court cases validating the liberal cause du jour. And speaking of American liberals: Any and every one now shedding crocodile tears over Nino is a fool, an enemy, or both.
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