E-Mail This Article to a Friend No surprises Bush blows it. Scalia’s true colors. Romney’s grandstand.

ANYONE HOPING for straight talk about the worsening situation in Iraq, clarity regarding the status of US efforts in and around Afghanistan, or insight into the days and weeks before 9/11 from President Bush were sadly disappointed by his press conference Tuesday night. Instead, the nation was treated to a balm of platitudes: we are to "stay the course"; our "nation is to remain free"; "now is the time, Iraq is the place, we must not waver."

The ostensible reason for this press conference was to let Americans know what’s next in Iraq. That question still hovers unanswered. We are, Bush said, committed to the June 30 transfer of power in Iraq to Iraqis. Beyond that, there were no concrete details — such as which governing authority, specifically, we will transfer power to.

The men and women of the armed forces now under fire and facing long tours of duty to secure an elusive and perhaps unobtainable peace in Iraq have clearly performed more admirably than their political masters in the Pentagon and White House.

Unless Bush can prove otherwise, Iraq remains a war of personal pique, not political necessity. It was waged because Bush wanted it waged. Yes, Saddam was a monster. And yes, he preyed on the lives and spirits of his people. And yes, it is good that he is gone. But the truth is that international pressure had contained his threat. He did not have any weapons of mass destruction. While his threat to his people was real, today we face the threat of civil war; the potential for the establishment of a fundamentalist theocracy; and the terrorist activities that haunt Iraq. Bush has yet to explain how this bad situation can be made any better.

WE’RE NOT SURE what to make of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Take his latest outrage. During a talk he gave on the US Constitution at a high school in Mississippi, a US marshal providing protection for the justice ordered two reporters who were recording Scalia’s speech to hand over their tapes. As Scalia — ironically — held forth about how people just don’t appreciate the Constitution nowadays, the marshal erased what both reporters had recorded.

Scalia has a longstanding policy of not allowing his speeches to be recorded. But this policy was not made clear to the press before he began his talk at the high school. The marshal’s acts were in clear violation of the law. Scalia has since apologized — but not for his failure to intervene on behalf of the reporters. He instead apologized for the actions of the US marshal in question, Melanie Rube, claiming in a letter to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had publicly protested Rube’s actions, that he was "as upset as you were" by what the marshal had done.

If Scalia were really upset, he could have stopped Rube from taking the tapes in the first place. The reporters were sitting near the front of the audience and Rube approached them during Scalia’s speech. They at first tried to resist her request — it’s hard to imagine that Scalia didn’t understand what was going on.

This, of course, is just the latest example of odd behavior from Scalia — who was once regarded as one of the more charming and personable of the high-court justices. Since 2000, Scalia has alienated both his colleagues and the public on a number of occasions. Take his concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, in which he — bizarrely — wrote: "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner, and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." This line of reasoning — it is the burden of petitioner Bush to show harm if the recount goes forward, and he has successfully done that by demonstrating that a recount might show that Al Gore actually won the election — is said to have incensed moderates on the court such as Stephen Breyer and David Souter. Then there was his hysteria-tinged dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, in which Scalia all but predicted that banning sodomy laws would lead to the demise of Western civilization. Finally, there is Scalia’s arrogant flouting of conflict-of-interest ethics with his refusal to recuse himself from an upcoming case involving Vice-President Dick Cheney — even though the two men recently went on a duck-hunting vacation together.

Ignoring a free-speech violation committed in his name; blithely dismissing blatant conflicts of interest; relying on Catch-22 logic to install a United States president in the White House; and employing the rhetoric of right-wing hate groups — this is not what we expect of a United States Supreme Court justice.

GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY, no surprise, is wrong once again. Last week he signed into law a bill that would expand the pool of sex offenders eligible for the civil-commitment process. Now someone convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior — engaging in public sex, for instance — can theoretically be committed to a psychiatric facility for years.

The bill, dubbed Ally’s Law after Alexandra Zapp, who was brutally murdered in the restroom of a Route 24 Burger King by a two-time sex offender, is a feel-good sop to a public with an apparently insatiable appetite for lock-’em-up measures that accomplish nothing. Just look at the facts of Zapp’s death: if her murderer had been enrolled in the Intensive Parole for Sexual Offenders (IPSO) program — which subjects sex offenders to aggressive monitoring, including lie-detector tests, random drug tests, mandated counseling, and pre-approval of employment — he never would have been allowed to work at the rest stop where he encountered Zapp in the first place. But he wasn’t enrolled in the program because it was never implemented statewide; in fact, the state has cut the program’s funding. Programs like IPSO — no one enrolled in the program has ever re-offended — offer cost-efficient solutions to seemingly intractable social problems. Ally’s Law, meanwhile, is a costly, inefficient measure that will not make anyone safer. All it will do is make a grandstanding politician look — and quite possibly feel — better.

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