There is a difference between being "smart" and being "facile". The neocon cabal - Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld et al - were all proclaimed geniuses by their publicists. But none of them were very smart. Take Douglas Feith for example, otherwise known as the "undersecretary of state for fiascos." Amost every decision he made, or policy he recommended, ended up in disaster. General Tommy Franks, quoted in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, calls Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Based on the easily ascertainable record, this conclusion is hard to avoid. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/05/douglas_feith.html
Yet Feith moved on to become a professor at Georgetown, and a "Senior Fellow" at The Hudson Institute, and publicists keep telling the world he is smart.
Scalia, like most of his cohorts in the neocon cabal, was not smart, in spite of the relentless propaganda campaign saying otherwise.
Scalia's record is replete with facile, ideologically driven stupidity. For example, Scalia's position that executing the innocent does not violate the constitution. "Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached." Antonin Scalia. Facile sophistry, based on a legal technicality, and ultimately stupid - certainly lacking the wisdom (and common sense) one would hope for in a Supreme Court justice. One could fill a book with similar examples of Scalia's stupidity.
(" Bush v. Gore. Hobby Lobby. Citizens United. Gutting the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, gun control, the Violence Against Women Act, and—one last 'middle finger raised against human progress—EPA regulations to control global warming. These are just a few of the disastrous 5–4 Supreme Court decisions in which Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last week at the age of 79, participated. If it were all up to him, we’d be even worse off: He was in the minority voting against the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and in favor of people being executed for crimes they committed as children. In his world, women would be barred from the Virginia Military Institute (and who knows where else), Roe v. Wade would be long overturned, and Miranda warnings would be history. The list goes on and on.") http://www.thenation.com/article/america-changed-antonin-scalia-never-did/)
My grandmother was smarter than Antonin Scalia, by a wide margin.
He was an idealogue with a facile gift for twisting facts, logic and common sense to serve his agenda, which was not the agenda of an intelligent person. Similar to Feith, he was an advocate for social and legal disasters.
It will take years to repair the damage Scalia did to this country, and a good start would be recognizing that he just wasn't that bright.