Althouse: "They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow," said Donald Trump.

February 17, 2016

"They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow," said Donald Trump.

And now John Poindexter, the man who found Justice Scalia dead, clarifies: He "had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying. The pillow was against the headboard."

That should end the conspiracy thinking.

Or... would you say "over his head" to refer to a pillow above the head, between the head and the headboard?

62 comments:

John Christopher said...: The ol' Chicago Headboard.; 2/17/16, 4:40 PM
Bob Boyd said...: I heard there was also a grassy knoll on the 30,000 acre ranch.
Coincidence?; 2/17/16, 4:43 PM
amielalune said...: No. You would say "above his head" or, actually, why would you mention it? Why didn't he tell us where the blankets were, then?; 2/17/16, 4:46 PM
Birkel said...: Those Pelicans are busy birds...; 2/17/16, 4:47 PM
Rob said...: Have Megan Marshack's whereabouts been determined?; 2/17/16, 4:47 PM
M Jordan said...: The conspiracy theories are based on the lack of an autopsy, not the placement of the pillow which was just a salacious doorway into the conspiracy room.; 2/17/16, 4:52 PM
Theranter said...: All this pillow talk!

I was on board with his clarification prior to his doing so, based on looking at the pic of the guest room after the Justice's body was removed.

Then I looked again, closer this time, and dang it if in addition to the pillows still against the headboard, there is a third pillow on top of the pile of bed linens adjacent to where the two headboard-propped-would-be-over-his-head pillows are.

Which led to me to wonder--why would they drag his body across the bed to remove him? Why not from the edge he (based on the propped pillows) was on? Hmm.; 2/17/16, 4:55 PM
CachorroQuente said...: Trump is a birther (squared), an anti-vaxer, and a soft 911 truther. He pals around with nut jobs like the Savage Michael Weiner and Austin, Texas conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Alex LeatherLungs Jones. It's no surprise that he would jump on this crazy train. Why do people think Trump is smart? Doesn't appear to be much supporting evidence.

Too bad there was no autopsy, but when an old man in failing health dies in his sleep and there is nothing to indicate any non-natural cause of death, an autopsy is not normally done.

Let's hope that the Scalia truthers don't descend to the level of accusing family members of being co-conspirators as the 911 truthers have done with family members of those killed on 911.; 2/17/16, 5:09 PM
fivewheels said...: Mentioning that the pillow was above his head does not seem like a normal thing to do. On the other hand, Megan McArdle had a series of tweets today explaining why she (among others, presumably) sleeps with a pillow over her face. It's for extra quiet and darkness, I guess.; 2/17/16, 5:14 PM
eric said...: Isn't Poindexter a big Democrat donor?; 2/17/16, 5:14 PM
Etienne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 2/17/16, 5:22 PM
readering said...: Unfortunate that the family elected not to have autopsy performed, given that funeral not for a week after death discovered. Now the investigation into the circumstances has uncovered ethical issue--why was he there for free?; 2/17/16, 5:28 PM
Rich Rostrom said...: The pillow was adjacent to the top of his head, therefore "over his head". The top is "the top", even if the head is not upright. I could touch "the top" of my head to the floor.

Or it was between his head and the headboard at the end of the bed, therefore "behind his head".

Probably the most precise description would be "next to his head", but almost everyone would imagine the pillow against one of his ears.; 2/17/16, 5:33 PM
Chuck said...: So I guess that there is no subject too tiny, too trivial, or too vague such that Donald Trump wouldn't be able to weigh in with some stupid and indefensible comment. And there is of course nothing that Trump can say, that his erstwhile supporters would think is stupid or indefensible.

I can't wait for Trump v Cruz, et al in the United States District Court for the Southern Division of New York. They will be able to file it in the Donald Trump Memorial File Room of frivolous lawsuits.; 2/17/16, 5:58 PM
robinintn said...: How is anyone supposed to know what the scene was? The only one talking is Poindexter, and there's apparently going to be nothing else.; 2/17/16, 5:58 PM
Fernandinande said...: That should end the conspiracy thinking.

Because a semi-politician changed his story?; 2/17/16, 6:00 PM
MacMacConnell said...: Is there a conspiracy theory Donald Trump won't politically dry hump?; 2/17/16, 6:04 PM
Sigivald said...: "Why did Poindexter change his story?!!?"

You can't use mere reason to stop conspiracy-people, unfortunately.; 2/17/16, 6:08 PM
TRISTRAM said...: The only thing we know for sure is that the same government that feels compelled to record all of our phone calls, text messages, and emails in vast data collection centers did not think the sudden death of a Supreme Court Justice worth so much as an autopsy.; 2/17/16, 6:16 PM
Beldar said...: The investigation of Mr. Justice Scalia's death included local authorities, the U.S. Marshals, and the FBI. Justice Scalia left a widow and nine adult children; the adult children, unsurprisingly, are quite accomplished in their own right. Had anyone involved in the official investigation seen any need for an autopsy of an elderly man with heart trouble who was found dead in bed, alone, with no signs of foul play, then an autopsy would have been conducted whether the family wanted it or not. Had the family the slightest doubt about the efficacy or thoroughness of the official investigation, they could have ordered a private autopsy; they did not, and that is their right -- regardless of whether any of us might have chosen otherwise.

I suspect the only reason the family might have chosen otherwise would have been to shut up the conspiracy theorists. But of course, that wouldn't shut them up: They're still arguing about JFK's autopsies from 1963, and they're nuts.

Yes, lots of people hated him and wrote ugly, celebratory things when he died. That's not causation; that's not evidence of anything.

I've no patience with this nonsense. Anyone promoting it is doing so out of ghoulish malice, and should be ashamed.

Trump, though, is shameless. And you can't shame the shameless.; 2/17/16, 6:19 PM
Once written, twice... said...: So Scalia died because he was engaging in dangerous asphyxiation sex with some high price hooker? What an embarrassing way to go.; 2/17/16, 6:26 PM
Nichevo said...: I think it's reasonable for all high officials to be autopsied after an unanticipated death in office. No likey, no run/accept.; 2/17/16, 6:29 PM
rhhardin said...: Epstein Scalia another podcast.; 2/17/16, 6:30 PM
traditionalguy said...: Trump says what everybody is thinking and no one else has guts to say. Then you can deal with it. Putting it in the closet only causes mental illness to pop up later on. It's what Crockodile Dundee's bartender did for the community of Walkabout Creek.; 2/17/16, 6:38 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: So you smother the person with the pillow . . . and leave the pillow over his face? What is this, an episode of Murder, She Wrote?; 2/17/16, 6:44 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: 1st conspiracy theorist: "You don't believe that Oswald killed Kennedy, do yoy?"
2nd conspiracy theorist: "No way! The kill shot came from the grassy knoll!"
1st conspiracy theorist: "Yeah, everyone knows that, but who fired from the grassy knoll?"
2nd conspiracy theorist: "Uh, I dunno . . . a Russian assassin? A mafia hit man?"
1st conspiracy theorist: "Nope. It was space aliens."
2nd conspiracy theorist: "Space aliens? You're @#%$% nuts, dude."; 2/17/16, 7:02 PM
Birkel said...: And "Once written, twice…" comes along to sully his own -- already low -- reputation with the sort of nastiness everybody expects from Leftists.

Scratch a Leftist and a totalitarian fascist bleeds.; 2/17/16, 7:41 PM
Laslo Spatula said...: I am sure he was not found under the Laslo Pillow.

I am Laslo.; 2/17/16, 7:55 PM
Bob Loblaw said...: Is it really that unusual for a 79 year old guy with multiple serious medical problems to not wake up in the morning? I can see some raised eyebrows over a suicide or a death at age 45, but this is a bit much.; 2/17/16, 7:56 PM
Beldar said...: @ Terry: You see, this dastardly and conspiratorial murder was planned by the Trilateral Commission, but actually executed by a ninja chupacabra. The UN black helicopters, using the famous Marfa Lights as their guidepoints, dropped the magical beast into the Marfa countryside, and he left no traces of his coming or going after sucking out Mr. Justice Scalia's life.

Alternatively, it could have been Ninja Nancy Pelosi. Or maybe the Pope.; 2/17/16, 8:25 PM
YoungHegelian said...: "They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,"

Which reminds me of the joke about the two retired traveling salesmen reminiscing about the good ol' days:

Salesman 1: "Remember that chick who opened the door in her negligee?"
Salesman 2: "Yeah, she was a beaut."
Salesman 1: "Gotta admit, though, that was a strange place to have a door..."; 2/17/16, 8:29 PM
lonetown said...: Maybe he felt flush and was cooling his forehead. Is a hot head a symptom of a heart attack? or some other pathology?; 2/17/16, 8:39 PM
Titus said...: OK, I am watching Marco on CNN and he dyes his hair just like Saint Ronny (our lord and savior)-how gay is that when a male politician dyes their hair?

Scalia dyed his hair too....so gay.

How do u old crackers feel about pubes, whom you love, dye their hair?

Cool or not?; 2/17/16, 8:41 PM
Chuck said...: Kristian Holvoet said...
The only thing we know for sure is that the same government that feels compelled to record all of our phone calls, text messages, and emails in vast data collection centers did not think the sudden death of a Supreme Court Justice worth so much as an autopsy.

A) The government doesn't "record all of our phone calls, text messages, and emails in vast data collection centers." No credible person has ever claimed such a thing. Lots of credible people, with the highest security clearances, have said positively that no such thing happens.

B) You, Mister FreedomAndLibertyFromGovernment, think that a government should require the family of a deceased gentleman in his late seventies to submit the body of their beloved father to an autopsy even if they'd rather not?

Allow me the liberty of a guess... is it Trump?; 2/17/16, 8:47 PM
John A said...: A blogger elsewhere noted her father often slept with a pillow over at least part of his head, to block light. Indeed, I have occasionally done this.; 2/17/16, 9:02 PM
Quaestor said...: Titus wrote How do u old crackers feel about pubes, whom you love, dye their hair?

Crackers is it? Are you stooping to racist insults now? (Silly me, stooping is SOP in Titusville.)

45 years is pretty goddamn old not to able to write a coherent sentence, Titus, you ancient queer.; 2/17/16, 9:02 PM
Quaestor said...: John Poindexter has taken a his sweet time clarifying his unusual use of the phrase "pillow over his head" which since at least the time of the Emperor Tiberius usually means to be found murdered by suffocation.; 2/17/16, 9:07 PM
David said...: "That should end the conspiracy thinking."

Conspiracy thinking is endless. It's the whole point of it.; 2/17/16, 9:35 PM
Diaocbinhduong.org said...: http://thuthuatlaptrinh.com; 2/17/16, 9:41 PM
David said...: The Scalia family didn't want an autopsy but let's carve the guy up anyway just to satisfy the media, the tabloids and conspiracy wahoos. Who cares about his silly family. And maybe it's time to exhume Reagan. I heard that one day while Nancy was away his kids poisoned him. And that Lincoln guy. Why did they put him in that concrete vault? What were they hiding? Did you know that his vice president was named Johnson? Never have a VP named Johnson. It's part of a conspiracy.; 2/17/16, 9:43 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: David said...
"That should end the conspiracy thinking."

Conspiracy thinking is endless. It's the whole point of it.

2/17/16, 9:35 PM

Umberto Eco wrote Foucault's Pendulum to explain conspiracy thinking. The draw isn't that it makes sense, it is that it is 'secret knowledge.' Believing it makes you one of the elect. It makes you not one of the bleating 'sheeple.'; 2/17/16, 9:52 PM
Beldar said...: @ Quaestor: So let me see if I can follow your logic.

Emperor Tiberius was smothered. A pillow was left behind by the murderer.

A pillow was in Justice Scalia's bedroom. Therefore Justice Scalia was smothered.

Evidence, man. Do you know what it means?; 2/17/16, 10:04 PM
gadfly said...: And Justice Scalia didn't have steak for dinner before going to bed . . .

This guy has all sorts of strange details and even comments about the peaceful look on the dead man's face.

But factually, there are bunches of leftists who got bit or were being bitten by Justice Scalia, so what is this BS about no autopsy or investigation?; 2/17/16, 10:09 PM
gadfly said...: Donald's ability to oversimplify is mind-boggling. He must have an IQ of about 75.; 2/17/16, 10:13 PM
Mark said...: All these folks calling for an autopsy should be happy to have the chests of their deceased loved ones sliced open, then the skin pealed back and the rib cage sawed or snipped open and removed, then all of the internal organs cut out and dissected, while another incision is made around the head, and the skull cut off, and brain removed and dissected, so that the head and body are mere empty shells.

Yeah, that's just the way you voyeuristic ghouls would want the person you loved to be treated.; 2/17/16, 10:18 PM
Anonymous said...: Pillows can be at weird angles based on how people sleep. I have slept with my head underneath a pillow, with it at 45 degrees, and also at near vertical at times, usually when dealing with an ailment of some sort.

I suppose it's possible aliens abducted the justice, tortured him in a spacecraft for five years, then time-traveled back and deposited the dead body in bed with no sign of injury, or some other fantastical but not disprovable theory, but the most likely scenario for a 79-year old heavy-set man is death by natural causes.

It doesn't have to be anything dramatic at that age - it could have been as simple as an acute infection, a sleep apnea from which there was no recovery, or quite possibly he knew he had something terminal and simply didn't make it publicly known (which, given some of the ugliness seen this weekend, we should be thankful we were spared the public spectacle of a Scalia deathwatch).; 2/17/16, 10:21 PM
Laslo Spatula said...: It was a Sex Pillow.

He had a hooker in the room, and he -- while fucking her -- had her bite the pillow.

After she was gone he laid the pillow over his face to relive the moment.

He died with hooker smell on his face.

Come on: you all know that hooker smell.

It is like 'stripper smell' but a bit more tangy.

A lot of this depends -- of course -- on the hooker's state of gingivitis.

Because hookers should brush their teeth more.

Especially given what they do with their mouths.

Hookers do things with their mouth for money.

To explain.

I am Laslo.; 2/17/16, 10:39 PM
Birkel said...: Mark,

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I think the most likely explanation of his death is he died in his sleep. I hope it was peaceful. And if his family doesn't want an autopsy, then that is fine by me. It's their choice and we should all mind our own business.

But why should anybody care about the process of an autopsy? What difference should those details make? Do you think Justice Scalia will mind if what is now a useless shell is cut? Would extracting some blood to test for poison be too much? Would testing the liver for poisons be too much? Or searching the body for needle marks that might suggest insulin poisoning? I don't know why you are fetishizing the dead body so much.

Was the installation of the pacemaker magically performed without cutting the man? Apparently he allowed that gruesome procedure.; 2/17/16, 10:48 PM
Birkel said...: That is unseemly in the extreme, Laslo.; 2/17/16, 10:50 PM
retired said...: You're such a troll.; 2/18/16, 1:19 AM
Quaestor said...: Beldar wrote: @ Quaestor: So let me see if I can follow your logic.

Very lawyerly of you, Beldar. That you reached the conclusion you reached is EVIDENCE that you don't know the first rule of logic, which is don't read between the lines.; 2/18/16, 1:57 AM
Laura said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 2/18/16, 2:16 AM
Laura said...: Clue phone's a ringing. Was it Mrs. Scalia's perfume on the batting? What did the ticking smell like? And how quickly were the goose feathers laundered? Ether I'm asking weird questions or I need to get back to working in my own nest.

Hope it was Mrs. Scalia's perfume with a countenance of blissful repose . . . maybe with her lip cells to scrape off his, or his cheek.

Not like he'd get the blue-light special treatment with his income level. Why would he shop at Kmart, or watch CSI when he got home?; 2/18/16, 2:18 AM
Laura said...: Whatever you do, don't watch "The Following with Kevin Bacon." 'Cuz you'll start thinking magnets, and messing with the pacemaker rhythms, and you'll get butt cramps from binge watching.

The obvious answer is the Secret Society of Oregonian Ranchers gave him a free room at the rancher's underground bed and breakfast to implicate his tax records for impeachment, that's how money flows through the cowboy pipeline.; 2/18/16, 2:34 AM
sdharms said...: Ann, have you ever wondered why several of your regular commenters resort to such vile, vulgar language for no apparent reason? I do. And the answer I come up with does not reflect well on you.; 2/18/16, 4:12 AM
Ann Althouse said...: @sdharms

No, I don't wonder. I believe they are attempting, sometimes successfully, a mode called humor. That may be alien to you, but I recognize your mode too and don't wonder about it. Your mode is shaming.; 2/18/16, 4:54 AM
Chris N said...: The ol' 'Texas Breakfast'

'Huevos Rancheros'

'St Louis Squeeze'

Message received, Althouse.; 2/18/16, 6:40 AM
Quaestor said...: All these folks calling for an autopsy should be happy to have the chests of their deceased loved ones sliced open... blah, blah, blah

I am truly bewildered by the attachment some people have for dead flesh. As I understand it some people believe that their loved ones will be bodily resurrected at some point, Christians and Muslims mainly. Fine. I think that's unlikely, but assuming it is not then must assume that reconstituting the body is not a problem for God, else many of the faithful, dead and utterly dissolved these last 2000 years, are going to have to be content with an eternity incarnated as a heap of organic dust. In fact it could be argued that those who seek to preserve the death intact are denying the power of the godhead to so order things as to allow a bodily afterlife. So why the concern over a forensic dissection of what amounts to nothing of theological importance? Is it not significant that, unlike Judaism or Islam or Hinduism, Christianity has no canonical funerary tradition? I've read nothing in the New Testament that implies that the resurrection of Jesus was contingent on his being interred in the manner that he was. Lazarus was raised even after his corpse was odiferous with decay. (By this time he stinketh.)

If one takes the opposite position, that life after death is nonsense, then it also follows that affection for or sentimental attachment to a corpse is indefensible since the once living being is now just a source of contamination, and should be disposed of in as an efficient and expeditious manner as possible.; 2/18/16, 7:19 AM
Jaq said...: That should end the conspiracy thinking

ALthouse makes a funny!; 2/18/16, 7:23 AM
bbkingfish said...: Other than the facts that the Justice was wearing a pillow over his head, and nothing else but a frilly tutu, and that the entire lot of he and the other (so-far) anonymous fogies were staying gratis at this sumptuous, secluded, resort to enjoy a weekend of limitless, on-the-cuff, corporeal indulgence, and that Nino was there alone, without his wife, was there anything noteworthy about the circumstances surrounding Scalia's death?; 2/18/16, 12:32 PM
Birkel said...: And bbkingfish enters the fray to make allusions to things about which he has vanishingly little knowledge.

Thank goodness Scalia was an avid defender of free speech, even by dipshits and ass holes. Right?; 2/18/16, 1:11 PM
mikee said...: With Bill Clinton visiting an island of sex slaves multiple times, anyone from the left throwing mud on the death of Scalia needs a reality check.; 2/18/16, 5:04 PM