Ordure in the Court
Synecdoche (syn-ECK-d’-key) and Metonymy are very nearly the same thing except that Synecdoche is in upstate New York and metonymy is what sets in when you watch too much C-Span.
Both are figures of speech in which a part or aspect of something is used to stand for the thing itself. If you have six mouths to feed, actually you have six entire people to feed.
All of this by way of suggesting that Clarence Thomas is a synecdoche for the conservative majority of the current Supreme Court.
He lied his way onto the court. In the 2000 presidential election, he voted to butt into the Florida recount and appoint the loser to the White House. He’s consistently voted Republican in the high judicial chamber that the Constitution envisions as being above politics and partisanship. He accepts favors from corporations and right-wing lobbyists like the Koch brothers and then votes their way on court decisions – like Citizens United, which opened the door to unlimited money from those merchants of avarice to buy or steal elections at all levels of misgovernment. In fact, he attended a private meeting hosted by the Kochs shortly before the Citizens United decision.
And now it turns out that Justice Thomas has been lying on his annual financial disclosures.
The disclosure form requires the justices to report any non-investment income earned by their spouses. For six straight years, Thomas has checked the box marked “zero.”
During that time, his wife Virginia – another right-wing activist — earned $687,000 from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, plus an unknown amount from Liberty Central, a rightist organization that she herself founded.
Zero? And he’s the one who claimed it was Anita Hill who was lying?
If Justice Thomas’s excuse is that he forgot about that income on all six occasions, then questions might arise about dementia and disqualification from the bench.
Of course the other conservative justices may not see it that way. They think alike, they act alike, and they stick together.
They should all be in federal prison in Synecdoche.