. . . is a dead conservative.
This is a funny little journalistic genre unto itself. The people who hated — who positively despised — William F. Buckley while he was alive, who called him a Nazi and a fascist, now hold him up as an example of urbanity and civility that indicts contemporary conservatives.
The people who denounced Ronald Reagan as a dunce and a warmonger now repeat stories (untrue stories) about how he and Tip O’Neill were buddy-buddy off the clock.
And now, from Slate: “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Would Be Too Extreme for Scalia.” Of course, Jacob Finkel insists that Antonin Scalia’s “textualism” — the belief that judges have to deal with what the law actually says — is “radical,” but that the current justices are offering a radicalism that is “even more radical.”
What’s more radical than radical?
At issue is the question of whether a badly written (by all accounts) statute limiting the use of certain outmoded technology in telemarketing can be salvaged through a less strict reading of its language or whether Congress will be obliged to fix the law itself.
Which is to say, one possible outcome is that lawmakers may be asked to make some law: You know, right-wing radicalism.