Supreme Court cartoon robots with flashing eyes.

Beldar slams the big NYT Magazine piece about Justice Stevens, written by Jeffrey Rosen. (All the Supreme Court psychodramatists are named Jeffrey.)

Yellow journalists masquerading as legal scholars like The Jeffrey Rosen do their very best to persuade us that the Justices view each other in terms like "back-stabbers." In truth, you'll find, for example, Justice Scalia and his wife joining Justice Ginsberg and her husband at the opera several times a year because they like and respect each other despite their very different judicial viewpoints.

As Beldar notes, the kind of people who make it all the way to the Supreme Court are -- of necessity -- extraordinarily mature and highly self-regulated. So why do they come across as such hyper-dramatic characters in popular journalism?

Read Rosen's whole interview with Stevens. Look hard for personal insults toward other Justices that come from Stevens' lips. There aren't any. Instead, you get things like Rosen reporting that Stevens' "eyes [were] flashing" as he talked about Bush v. Gore.

Wow, really? His eyes were flashing? Way cool: John Paul Stevens as Optimus Prime! Pew-pew-pew! That, plus gossip and innuendo, is what Rosen has to peddle.

Yeah, eyes don't actually flash... and it would be spooky as hell if they did. Nor do eyebrows dance (as Jeffrey Toobin perceives looking at Justice Scalia).

And even if eyes flashed and eyebrows danced, it wouldn't necessarily signify what the Jeffreys tell you it signifies.