Three Washington Post writers have wheedled an embargoed copy of Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography out of a bookseller and collaborated on a quick read of it, on the newspaper’s front page. Headline? “Justice Thomas Lashes Out . . .” Lead sentence? “Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir . . .”

The book goes on sale Monday, and I look forward to the copy I’ve ordered. I wonder, though, if the Post’s scribes haven’t found just about all the “angry” bits in this 289-page book and put them in their 1,500-word story to give a certain impression about the book as a whole. We’ll see. But it would fit the thesis of a book already published on Thomas by two of these reporters, Michael Fletcher and Kevin Merida–one whose existence is never mentioned in the Post article, and which has an Amazon rank of 7,771 compared to Thomas’s position at #34. There wouldn’t be an adversary posture here, would there–perhaps tinged with a little envy?