The Anti-Sorkin

[libertango]

Recall Aaron Sorkin's great piece of advice from SportsNight:

"If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you!"

O'Brien's Addendum to Sorkin is, "Surrounding yourself with dumb people who disagree with you is just a waste of time."

I had mentioned this to akirlu recently, but as it turns out, the NYT has a piece about the increasing ideological requirements for Supreme Court clerks.

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Justice Clarence Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first trained with an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.

...

For his part, Justice Thomas has said that choosing clerks is like “selecting mates in a foxhole.”

“I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me,” he said at a luncheon in Dallas a decade ago. “It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”"

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If we believe Sorkin was giving sound advice, we are left with one of two unhappy conclusions: Either Mr. Thomas believes himself to be dumb, or he believes his clerks to be dumb.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Your reasoning is weak. Sorkin's advice is generally sound, though i think a little trite. But that doesn't imply everyone follows it, or even that they should. It seems very unlikely that either Thomas or the majority of his clerks are dumb; he is merely a smart person who disagrees with Aaron Sorkin.