Pardon the pun above, but Jan Crawford Greenburg’s all-out marketing strategy for her new book Supreme Conflict takes her today to conservative territory, on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal (subscribers only), where she makes the case for the significance of Justice Clarence Thomas as an independent, often persuasive jurist who is not just a “Scalia lackey.” Conservative Court-watchers, of course, already knew that Justice Thomas is not Stepin Fetchit, as many on the left seem to think, so it’s too bad Greenburg did not place this piece in the New York Times instead. Still, she has some interesting evidence from the conference notes of the late Justice Blackmun, just in case anyone was still so dim as to have a low opinion of Thomas’s abilities. As a second draft of history, not bad.