3, 2…1…Here Come the Cries That Obama Had Scalia Killed

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:45 pm

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (that’s Antonin, not Anthony, Michele Bachmann) dies, and we begin the countdown: 3…2….1…Yes, you know where I’m going with this don’t you?

The right wing conspiracy machine. The “Well, it has already begun, and I don’t believe it has to be spelled out, but hell, you knew it was coming. Obama did it” screeds you find at the Hannity forums, Breitbart, Twitter, and elsewhere.

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

Guess what sister? So did I. I knew those words were coming out of your mouth before you did. Death, taxes, and conservative idiocy.

I don’t know about you, but my first thought, on seeing that he had died, was they’re going to blame this on Obama, not Dick Cheney (if you smell what I’m cooking).

We all saw Saturday night the difference between “politically correct” and “factually correct” when Donald Trump correctly assigned blame for the destabilization of the Middle East and 9/11. The audience hated him for it. Did you really think they’d go for the facts around Scalia’s untimely death?

New Republic and Little Green Footballs (and others) have assigned themselves the task of monitoring the right-wing blogosphere and they have found loads of conservative people (for want of a better word) instantly pointing to Obama and the NSA (funny how the NRA never gets blamed and kills far more people than the NSA – just sayin’).

Yes. Antonin Scalia shared the fate of Andrew Breitbart. He died. And that’s about the only thing they had in common. “There is pure evil at work here.” Yes, it’s called death. It happens to us all. Sometimes at the most inconvenient moments.

There is even an old saying that covers this situation: “Man proposes, God disposes.” You know, from back when people thought God decided all these matters (imagine the heavenly bureaucracy). Or as Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven put it: “God decides. God always decides.”

Well, sometimes we kill each other. But even with all the shootings, usually, we just die. Scalia was 79. Can’t the man just die? He had already reached or surpassed his scientific shelf-life, which in the U.S. is 77.5 to 80 years.

But they have an answer for that!

And that from somebody who claims to be “center-right.” Uh-huh.

Instead of an appeal to the scientific underpinnings of the universe (these are conservatives we’re talking about) we get, “Very strange that this great man dies suddenly when so much is at stake. I can’t help but be suspicious of the liberal left.”

That’s not half as suspicious as Sarah Palin saying “target” and somebody shooting Gabby Giffords. But remember how this same crowd howled about any suggestion of a relationship between the two. Causation apparently only works in one direction, because it’s more convenient that way.

So just to be sure, “They need to do a double autopsy to make sure the Obola crowd had nothing to do with Scalia’s death…” That’s right. Not a single autopsy. But do it twice, because if its worth doing once…This is, by the way, the same logic used of the Benghazi and Planned Parenthood hearings.

This is why it’s dangerous to elect Republicans. It’s not just the people running the party, but the people voting for the party. They’re all clinically something unpleasant.

They blame Clinton (who left ofice 9 months before) or even Obama (who entered office eight years later) for 9/11, and even called Afghanistan (invaded by Bush in 2001) “Obama’s War” so there is, as I said, nothing at all surprising about this reality avoidance.

It is instead a salutary lesson about the dangers of letting Republicans win elections. Your motto in 2016 should be, as a concerned citizen, “Friends don’t let friends vote Republican.” Because that’s the same thing as letting them drive drunk, and we all know what happens then. The only difference is that in 2016, the entire country will be in the passenger seat.

Think about that.