Posted on 08/29/2011 1:56:16 PM PDT by Da Bilge Troll
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.the-american-interest.com ...
The fact that Thomas remains silent during oral arguments reminds me of the story of another Thomas, a very tall heavyset youth who seldom spoke in school, so that all the other students called him the “Dumb Ox.” We know him as St. Thomas Aquinas.
whatddda bout Zorr0?
“If we wish to be true to a Constitution that does not cede a police power to the Federal Government, our Commerce Clause’s boundaries simply cannot be “defined” as being “ `commensurate with the national needs’ “ or self consciously intended to let the Federal Government “ defend itself against economic forces that Congress decrees inimical or destructive of the national economy.”
- Clarence Thomas UNITED STATES, PETITIONER v. ALFONSO LOPEZ, Jr. 1995
There was a lot more to it...if you knew how to use it. Gandalf, Sauron and the leaders of the High Elves could have used it. Frodo and Bilbo didn’t have the knowledge. In hands of an ordinary man or Hobbit, it was essentially equivalent to having weapons-grade plutonium, but no idea how to turn that into a bomb or nuclear reactor.
Very interesting! In The New Yorker yet.
I heard him speak once and he is very brilliant. He’s a very measured speaker so you’re not waiting for any flash and dazzle rhetoric, but he comes out with careful and precise point after point, all right on target.
Mark
You haven’t read the book, have you? The failure of Sauron to prepare for the hobbits (compare to Star Wars’ evil empire’s failure to defend against a lone X-wing fighter) was something deeply woven into the story. He was looking for the ring but expected that the bearer would inevitably be captured by him, because he expected the bearer to be a human. He hadn’t counted on hobbits, which were so unambitious and incurious as to be largely immune to the ring’s power, and he hadn’t counted on Smeagal, the perverted hobbit, and his banal level of evil.
Just another Georgia fella getting it right!
You rock Clarence.
Gosh, does that make me a racist?
I agree with Justice Thomas here!
Mark
Immortality. Elves were not truly immortal, only ageless. The ring made one impervious, not merely ageless, and therefore capable of anything in battle.
I believe that Sauron was intently looking for the ring throughout. And, that included hobbits. The riders were looking for hobbits at the Prancing Pony in Bree.
The reason he did not see it was the hobbits rarely used it due to their nature. Putting the ring on gave Sauron a connection to its location. Every time someone did that, Sauron zoomed in. The ring kept tempting Frodo, but the hobbits' nature gave him the ability to resist (with a little help from Samwise on occasion). And wasn't Smeagal one of the "river folk", considered a different, though similar, race than the hobbits?
OK, geek critical mass has been achieved. No matter which of us is right, we both need to get a life.
:-)
They differ because Thomas understands the underlying philosophy of Natural Law Theory and inalienable rights which come from God and is consistent in his thinking which is VERY logical....since logic originated in the laws of nature.
Scalia has “reasoned” that abortion rights can be “voted” on by states. THAT would be Constitutional????? Never, not with the understanding of inalienable rights—made so clear in our constitution and by Natural Law Theory....which says that inalienable rights can NEVER be given away or taken away. NEVER.
This fundamental meaning of our Constitution is destroying the very Rule of Law and creating man made-up laws not based on God’s law and the laws of nature....so we get all bizarre sort of “reasoning” like two men can “marry”. Such idiocy (and unconstitutional) is the thinking of Scalia at times.
Natural Rights of human beings can never be voted away like in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Gulags. Our laws believe in a Supreme Law—Objective Truth. To deny God, is to deny that we have Natural Rights.
Right Reason according to Nature (God’s Law) is the basis of all Just Law in the US—or should be....we have seen very irrational things (Marxism) codified into laws here though.
Supra Positive Law==which exists in the US can declare these “null and void” and should if we were operating under the Constitution of the US instead of the USSR which established a separation of God and State.
"...Taken seriously today, that approach to the Constitution would change the way Washington does business. Radically. The list of enumerated powers is short and does not include, for example, health care, education, agricultural subsidies, assistance to the hungry or old age pensions. Most of the New Deal and Great Society (with the interesting exception of civil rights laws which enforce the Civil War era amendments) would be struck down. Whole cabinet departments would close..."
Hence no need for back room deals, negotiations with liars, libtards and losers...If it is not in there, you CAN NOT DO IT! If it is in there YOU CAN NOT TOUCH IT! In fact your favorite DC Rinos would not even have to grow a spine!! hahahah!!
Great article and artillery for the coming fight in 2012...
I'm thinking that Toobin, a liberal, used that forum to alert the lefty world that their standard 20-year old Clarence Thomas meme needs to change. The Left is particularly fond of the existing Thomas theme--that he's a dumb, shiftless sex maniac/-because it allows them to be as racist as they want to be without any repercussions.
To use another Tolkien analogy, Toobin is trying to light the beacons.
Clearly, Thomas is the originalist.
Bless him for being the conservative jurist that he is, but Scalia's argument smacks of expediency.
Wickard v Filburn.
Insanity, institutionalized.
The Huffington Post reported on August 16, 2008, following the Saddleback interview with then-presidential-candidate Obama, the following:
"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas," said the presumptive Democratic nominee. "I don't think that he...' the crowd interrupted with applause. 'I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretations of a lot of the constitution.'"
Three years later, and we now have Toobin, certainly not a conservative legal thinker, saying:
"In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication."
Generally, most might agree that Justice Thomas views the Constitution in a manner which would be somewhat consistent with the following declaration by Thomas Jefferson, America's third President:
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." - -Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, 12 June 1823
Inasmuch as Justice Thomas over a lifetime, most likely, has immersed himself in study of the writings and speeches of America's Founders, the great fountains of wisdom from which (and from whom) they drew their ideas about liberty, the human tendency to abuse delegated power, and the history of civilization's struggle against tyranny, one understands better his tendency to listen more than to speak, as well as his emergence as an "intellectual leader" on the Court.
As for the value one places on Presidential opinions about "interpretations" of the Constitution, or their personal evaluations of "legal thinkers," then one might need to examine the depth of study of that President and how he/she views the role, reach, and scope of government structured by the Founders' written Constitution for a free society.
One early President, James Madison, who came to be known as the "father" of the Constitution because of his role in the Convention, believed government's beneficial function to be "benign." He said:
"The enviable condition of the people of the United States is often too much ascribed to the physical advantages of their soil & climate .... But a just estimate of the happiness of our country will never overlook what belongs to the fertile activity of a free people and the benign influence of a responsible government." - James Madison
In the Year 2011, with our understanding of the stark and sometimes deadly differences between the quality of being "benign" and of being "malignant" as it pertains to our bodies, we are presented with an almost graphic difference between Madison's understanding of a constitutionally-limited government whose "influence" is "benign," and an understanding which favors enormous and invasive government power.
A logical conclusion to such reasoning might be that President Madison's opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas as "legal thinker" and "jurist" might be vastly different than President Obama's.
About Clarence Thomas, The Honorable Justice of the United States of America
http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/ajc/swf/gullah/movie2.swf
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was raised as a Gullah speaker in coastal Georgia. When asked why he has little to say during hearings of the court, he told a high school student that the ridicule he received for his Gullah speech as a young man caused him to develop the habit of listening rather than speaking in public.[4] Thomas’s English-speaking grandfather raised him after the age of six in Savannah.[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language
If Scalia is no friend of the Second Amendment, then neither is Thomas, since Thomas did not dissent from Scalia’s opinion in, or even write a separate concurring opinion for, District of Columbia v. Heller.
I think that they’re both pretty solid on the Second Amendment.
So deciding not to do something is participating in it?
Insane. I guess I robbed the bank, supported the RATS, and built that new barn all because I decided against it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.