Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
He is all sorts of things, but he's not deranged. For many years, he has purveyed borderline crackpot legal theories. It seems to have worked for him, until now. There are all sorts of things that are objectively wrong with John thinks and says, but that is very different from calling him deranged.
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I can live with crackpot.
Nihilist could be argued, but nihilists tend to pick battles they can win, as they're endlessly running pure rational models in their heads.
Opportunist could also fit, but again, opportunists pick opportunities, not hopeless crusades. And were he that, he'd have been on TV rather than sitting in the shadows crafting his John Yoo memo for the overthrow of an election.
Crackpot works because he who crafts the frivolous in the hopes of justifying and manifesting the impossible is engaged in crackpottery. It's one thing to pull a Dershowitz and defend the seemingly indefensible so well you wind up defying terrible odds. It's very much another to construct a Rube Goldberg theory to set in motion a tin pot coup administered by a Keystone Kops brigade of nitwits, drunks (Rudy), and cult adherents. One cannot view the crowd of perverts, miscreants, and mental patients comprising Team Flip the Election and say, "Yeah, I've got your brief." That's a conscious decision to jump on the crackpot train.
And now, interestingly, we'll see the line where being too reckless a crackpot exposes one to criminal liability.
(I think the GA case is a fucked mess. The shotgun-where-a-rifle-is-needed strategy is dumb. And the challenges she'll have to overcome are huge. If... if... indeed she actually ever really planned to try the case, which doesn't appear certain.)
