At last, the truth can be told. Antonine “Tony Ducks” Scalia was not a real boy. Like Pinocchio or Jerry Mahoney or Mortimer Snerd he was made of wood and stuffed with kapok.
For all those years on the Supreme Court “Ducks,” as his friends called him, ran his mouth, telling bad jokes, making worse decisions and spewing pseudo intelligence.
Why didn’t they do an autopsy? Kapok. They already knew what was inside him. Kapok. And termites. Who did he sit next to on the bench? “Silent” Clarence.
Then, all of a sudden, this week, for the first time in a decade, Thomas spoke from the bench. He asked questions. Lots of questions. What ended the ten year silence?
His ventriloquist dummy, Tony, “died.” A horrible death. Geppetto was just about ready to have him turned into a real boy when the termites pushed out the last of the kapok and started to disintegrate the wood.
Silent Clarence is silent to longer because of his puppet’s termites.
That termite problem started to show some years back. Tony lost a limb or two. They called in the Orkin Man but to no avail.
Did the two justices ever differ on an opinion? No. But Thomas, with a history of foot-in-mouth predating his appointment to the court, must have thought it would be better to pull the strings that controlled Tony’s mouth than to open his own.
Now, you court historians may point out that Scalia was appointed years before the puppet master, Thomas. And that’s true. In the years before Thomas, Jim Henson operated the Tony dummy until his death in 1990. The following year, Tony wasn’t around much.
But in 1991, President George HW Bush decided he needed to have a full timer operating Tony and thus hired Thomas, already well known for putting words into other people’s mouths.
And that’s how it’s been since the Orkin man could no longer patch up the puppet.
Shrapnel:
--I lied Monday about not mentioning the Academy Awards, though it wasn’t on purpose and now I have to go back on my word. How did just about every television report on the ceremony fail to mention “best picture of the year” went to “Spotlight” which is about the Boston Globe’s fearless coverage of the scandal in the Church of Rome? Instead, we got a “breaking news” bulletin every time Leonardo DiCaprio belched.
--Super Tuesday changed nothing. The pattern will hold until something or someone breaks it: Hillary and Trump. Deal with it, at least through this month’s primaries.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2016
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