Clarence Thomas just hates having all this power

Editor’s note: The following first appeared in Dorf on Law.

On Friday, Justice Clarence "I hate DC" Thomas gave a speech to the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Conference that was so full of anger, false narratives, and whining that it is tragically perfect for the age of Trump. Here are some lowlights annotated.

In response to a question about mean-spiritedness, he said:

“I think there’s challenges to that. We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible.”

Translation: They would not let my wife and me overturn a presidential election.

"Reckless" people in Washington, DC, will "bomb your reputation."

Translation: Being the darling of Heritage, Fed Soc, and Fox, and having a former clerk as the 10 o'clock anchor on Fox, are not enough for this poor little snowflake.

“They don’t bomb you necessarily, but they bomb your reputation or your good name or your honor. And that’s not a crime. But they can do as much harm that way."

Translation: I have now been subject to a "high-tech lynching" and to word bombs as harmful as real bombs, and that is why, and the only real reason why, I want to overturn New York Times v Sullivan. When I'm criticized, I don't want to have to meet that pesky actual malice standard.

"The regular people I think are being disenfranchised sometimes by the way that we talk about cases.”

Translation: I realize that I am in fact disenfranchising regular people alive today when I take away their rights or subject them to gun violence based on conclusions I justify with cherry-picked quotations describing the practices of 18th-century enslavers, but I can call it the opposite because everyone here is too polite and too scared to say anything.

Editorial comment: You have nothing in common with "regular people."

Why he likes traveling outside DC: “You get to be around regular people who don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things, merely because they have the capacity to do it or because they disagree."

Translation: Only billionaires and Supreme Court justices get to do "harmful things because they have the capacity," not anyone else in our nation's capital.

Editorial Comment: How many times is this lackey to billionaires going to mention "regular people" in one speech?

“I wound up in this job ... and this is, we pray, to do whatever it was that God wanted me to do, what I was being called to do. But being in public life is not something I would have chosen to do.”

Translation: I have been here 33 years and will not leave until my very last breath (unless they take away my billionaire connections and then I'm out of here ASAP).

Editorial Comment: For the record, God didn't call you to your current job; George H.W. Bush and a too-readily-cowed Senate did.

While telling a story about walking with friends he said that was “before they started attacking myfriends; I hope I still have some."

Translation: Don't take away my luxury RV, my private flights and my yachts, please!!!

“I think what you are going to find and especially in Washington, people pride themselves on being awful. It is a hideous place as far as I’m concerned."

Translation: That is why I have lived and worked there since 1979, worked for the Congress, worked for the president, and worked for the Supreme Court. I am the living embodiment of the separation of powers and if I have to live in a hell hole to spread my evil, so it will be, as that is what I was put here to do.

Obvious Editorial Comment: If you hate DC so much, if you hate government so much, if you love being around regular people so much (like Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, the most regular of regular people) then for the love of God: RESIGN.