Nothing underscores the fantastical thinking of conservatives more than their propensity to justify torture based entirely on scenarios out of the television action drama, “24.”

If terrorist’s bomb was ticking, “it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that.”

– Scalia

The show — which is produced by friends of Rush Limbaugh, including Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, who accompanied him on a Viagra-fueled vacay on a Caribbean island in 2006 — features weekly potboilers with all the dramatic substance of “Perils of Pauline” and similar cliffhanger series from the classic movie era. The plots are beyond far-fetched, of the sort that could never happen in real life in a million years.

And yet the latest wingnut to base a legal interpretation of the legality of torture on the television show — although he never mentions the show by name — is no less an august personage than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a radio interview broadcast Tuesday that interrogators can inflict pain to obtain critical information, such as the location of a bomb about to explode or the plans or whereabouts of a terrorist group. “It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” Scalia told the BBC’s “Law in Action” program. Scalia said that determining when physical coercion could come into play was a difficult question. “How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be? I don’t think these are easy questions at all, in either direction,” he said.

And:

“I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture,” he said. “Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution? “Is it obvious, that what can’t be done for punishment can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to the society? I think it’s not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.”

Of course, the Islamic terrorists are in de facto suicide pacts when they launch attacks, so there is nothing that would prevent the tortured prisoner from lying and thus achieving two objectives: blowing up Los Angeles and punching his ticket for entry to heaven and the 90 virgins who await him.

In an unrelated but equally unbelievable statement, Scalia asserted that he is not the bad-tempered jerk he appears to be.

“I’m very tender,” he told an interviewer.