Doing Justice to Justice Thomas by Dan Mclaughlin
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GREECE VS. THE EU CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL JULY 20, 2015 • $4.95 DOING JUSTICE TO JUSTICE THOMAS BY DAN MCLAUGHLIN WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM Contents July 20, 2015 • Volume 20, Number 42 2 The Scrapbook Rights for trans fats, the ultimate in consent contracts, & more 5 Casual Philip Terzian, The Reverend 7 Editorials Open Season • Can We Rise to the Occasion? Articles 10 The Unending Conversation BY ANDREW FERGUSON It just goes on and on, my friend 12 Into the Abyss BY GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB From the halls of academia to the cover of Vanity Fair 13 Alexander the Great BY MICHAEL W. M CCONNELL Leave Hamilton on the $10 bill 14 Hillary’s Headache BY JAY COST Bernie Sanders can cause her a lot of pain 16 What Happens in Vienna . BY LEE SMITH Could spell disaster for the Middle East 2 17 The Fate of the Senate BY FRED BARNES Coattails will be everything in 2016 18 A Misguided FDA Crusade BY ELI LEHRER The case for leaving cigarette fl avorings alone Features 20 Giving Thomas His Due BY DAN MCLAUGHLIN The justice who stands alone 26 Greece Monkeys BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The European Union is bailing itself out, not the Greeks 30 Free to Shut Up BY MARK HEMINGWAY The collision of religious liberty and gay rights in Oregon 10 Books & Arts 34 Highway to Heaven BY DANIEL LEE Building the yellow brick road to sunny Florida 36 Loss of Feeling BY PARKER BAUER ‘Men, trying to make themselves immortal, manage only to make themselves inhuman’ 37 The Turning Points BY MARK TOOLEY One theologian’s journey from there to here 39 Let George Do It BY HENRIK BERING A bumpy ride for America’s last king 40 Magnetic North BY JOHN C. CHALBERG A personal and political drama on the Korean peninsula 41 The Salter Version BY JEREMY BERNSTEIN Why the novelist’s prose was better than his fi ction 43 Bland Exterior BY JOHN PODHORETZ Inside Riley Anderson is the better place to be 26 44 Parody In the clouds COVER: NEWSCOM THE SCRAPBOOK Where Have You Gone, Mr. Arbuthnot? he old New Yorker used to have a language and empathy and search- predecessors, has a “panoramic T contributor named “Mr. Arbuth- ing intellect,” but the current occu- vision of America” in an “echoing not the Cliché Expert”—actually writ- pant of the White House talked about continuum of time,” and (here come er Frank Sullivan (1892-1976)—who, “the complexities of race and justice,” those metaphors again) “he spoke between 1935 and 1952, specialized in managed to “crystallize the mean- of how history ‘must be a manual’ identifying and analyzing the puerile ing of the occasion,” confronted “the to avoid ‘repeating the mistakes of thoughts and hackneyed phrases of sin of slavery and the terrible scourge the past’ while building ‘a roadway American politics and journalism. of war that was part of its price,” and, toward a better world.’ ” THE SCRAPBOOK has always lament- most important of all, “drew upon his And on and on. ed the passing of Mr. Arbuthnot— own knowledge of Scripture and lit- Of course, THE SCRAPBOOK tends indeed, the very science of laughing at to be cynical about these things, and clichés—because, while the thoughts even Michiko Kakutani concedes that and phrases have evolved with the all the beautiful thoughts and phrases decades, the problem remains. were the work not of Obama but of We were reminded of this the other a speechwriter, Cody Keenan, who week when President Obama flew “spoke with the president . about down to Charleston, South Carolina, the speech and hoped to emulate to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of Lincoln’s tone of reconciliation and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state healing.” Did he succeed? Well, not senator and the murdered pastor of without the healing touch of Barack the Emanuel African Methodist Epis- Obama, who “spent some fi ve hours copal Church. revising it . not merely jotting notes The circumstances were pain- erature and history—much the way on the margins, but whipping out the fully sad, to say the least, and the [Abraham] Lincoln and Dr. [Martin yellow legal pads he likes to write president’s moving and sensible sen- Luther] King did.” on”—shades of Richard Nixon!— timents rose to the occasion. What And speaking of history, as only “only the second time he’s done so for caught THE SCRAPBOOK’s attention was the president can, Kakutani remind- a speech in the last two years.” not the eulogy itself but the near-uni- ed us of the “long view of history,” Granted, it’s been a tough few years versal, and astonishingly banal, trib- “the prism of history,” the “arc of his- for the president’s admirers; and as utes to the president’s oratory. Indeed, tory,” the “broad vistas of history,” anyone who has attended a Bernie for the New York Times’s book review- and, in a smorgasbord of metaphors, Sanders rally can attest, the promise er Michiko Kakutani, in particular, Obama’s particular conviction—fi rst of the 2008 Barack Obama—and the it was 2008 and candidate Obama all expressed in his “deeply felt” mem- attendant prose and poetry of those over again. oir—that “history . is an odyssey, days in his honor—has been some- Once the worshipful, elegiac tone a crossing, a relay in which one gen- thing of a disappointment. So we can was established, the clichés were eration’s achievements serve as the understand Michiko Kakutani’s in- fi red from her keyboard like artillery. paving stones for the next genera- ability to stem the tide and resist the Not only did the president’s remarks tion’s journey.” pressure of those gathering clichés. draw “on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of For Barack Obama, unlike his But we sure miss Mr. Arbuthnot. ♦ How About Rights fat” out of their food. Trans fat, as bonds with each other. This increases you may know, is a type of fat that’s rigidity and gives you a more solid, for Trans Fats? partially hydrogenated—reacted with “saturated fat”—think of a chunk of n all the hubbub around the Su- hydrogen—to discourage its melting coconut oil. (The term “saturated” re- I preme Court’s big end-of-session at room temperature. Basically, the fers to saturation with hydrogen.) Par- rulings on same-sex marriage and idea is you take a liquid fat—a veg- tial saturation leaves you with a softer, Obamacare, some high-level banana- etable oil, for instance—and pump more malleable fat that’s spreadable republicanism was overlooked. The it full of hydrogen, which means the at room temperature but melts in the FDA has given American food manu- fat’s carbon atoms form bonds with microwave. (The “trans” prefi x refers facturers three years to get the “trans hydrogen atoms instead of double to a confi guration of hydrogen atoms NEWSCOM 2 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD JULY 20, 2015 on opposite sides of the carbon chain.) Trans fats became popular in the United States a couple of decades ago after the food police frightened every- one into using them instead of won- derful saturated fats like butter and lard, wrongly deemed an imminent threat to the nation’s arteries. (As an aside, THE SCRAPBOOK rarely feels sorry for millennials, but those of us old enough to remember the pre-1990 McDonald’s fries, cooked in beef tal- low, can attest that the world really was a better place then.) And, with apologies for the chemistry lesson, that brings us to today. If the FDA gets its way, trans fat in processed foods will go the way of lead in paint and asbestos in insula- tion. But there’s a major difference: Lead is inherently toxic and asbes- tos is inherently carcinogenic. Trans fat is inherently harmless—what’s dangerous is using it to excess. Eating trans fats increases the quantity of low-density lipoprotein in your bloodstream—that is, LDL cholesterol, or so-called bad choles- terol. LDL transports fat around your body; without it you’d die. It’s only bad if you have too much of it. Of course, almost any harmless thing can kill you in excess. You could be crushed to death sleep- ing under too many quilts, but the quilts themselves aren’t dangerous. Too much exercise can blow up your heart, but the FDA isn’t going to ban exercise. A ban on trans fat, in fact, The Ultimate in the “friendly amendments” offered has nothing in common with bans by Phil Lawler in his column at on toxins or carcinogens—all it does Consent Contracts CatholicCulture.org. Writes Lawler: is take something safe off the market f you were on social media last because you might not use it safely. I week, you no doubt heard about the Rather than just a selfi e, hire a profes- The FDA is substituting itself for new contract being promoted to col- sional photographer to take pictures your self-control. lege students by the activists at the as the consent is given. We used to call that “prohibition”; Affi rmative Consent Project in their And rather than relying exclu- sively on photographic evidence, it used to require a constitutional effort to beat back the supposed “rape have human witnesses. Invite family amendment. Under the new regime, culture” on U.S. campuses. The group and friends. all it takes is bureaucratic aggression. suggested that amorous couples, after We all make silly spur-of-the- (Of course, in reality, all it takes are signing the model contract, take a moment decisions at times.