E-Mail This Article to a Friend Guilt by nomination Why Alito is so bad; plus, the lesson of Theo

Trying to make sense of President Bush’s choices for the US Supreme Court is frustrating business. Frustrating because the process surrounding the nominees defies reality. It assumes that in making his choices, the president is acting out of some sense of noble motive — tinged, of course, by some small degree of political consideration. After all, the thinking goes, the man did win the election. When all is said and done, he’s the only president we have. And like dutiful citizens, those of us who did not vote for him are supposed to grin and graciously wait for our candidate to capture the White House so that someone more congenial can be named to the nation’s highest court.

Anyone who buys that line of thinking should have his or her head examined. If there is anything we’ve learned about Bush in his five years in office, it’s that he’s a liar. The nation is still digesting the lies that have landed US troops in what is clearly an interminable and probably unwinnable war in Iraq.

Bush’s really big lie, however, was his promise that he would govern from the center of the political spectrum. Bush is a right-wing radical, an economic royalist who favors the rich and the investor class over the working and middle classes. As for the poor, as far as Bush is concerned, to hell with them — especially if they were unlucky enough to live in Louisiana or other regions of the Gulf Coast.

The mainstream media are wedded to the false notion that the nomination, evaluation, and approval or rejection of Supreme Court justices somehow resembles a sacramental proceeding, more divinely inspired than not. That’s rot. The nomination of Judge Samuel Alito, like the nomination of the now-approved and sitting Chief Justice John Roberts, is an exercise in power politics. It’s another very conscious and deliberate attempt by President Bush to turn back the clock, not by 10 or even 20 years, but by increments of 50 or 100 years. His is a pre-Darwinian America, where men are men and women are wives (or should be), and we are all God’s children unless we are gay or lesbian.

Alito, like Roberts, is a rock-ribbed conservative. The only question is how conservative. Unlike Roberts, Alito has a long paper trail. And what that trail shows is disturbing. This we know: he thinks wives should be subservient to their husbands and that Congress does not have the authority to regulate who — if anyone — can own machine guns. When you strip away the intellectual window-dressing those are the only conclusions you are left with when you consider his, so far, two best-known judicial dissents. These are disturbing indicators.

If we have learned anything about Bush it is to watch what he does, not what he says. Why anyone thinks this dedicated and unprincipled reactionary would appoint anyone but hard-nosed right-wingers, albeit Ivy League–educated ones (there’s a delicious irony), to the nation’s highest court is beyond us.

At this point in his tenure, it should be clear that Bush is beyond reasonableness. It is unreasonable to assume or to even hope that Bush’s appointees will not do harm. The law of averages suggests that not everything they do will be bad, just most of it. And it will be all that much worse because Alito, if approved, and Roberts will appear to be so reasonable, so scholarly, so civil.

Bush and the scum that surround him have so polluted the language of our political discourse that America seems to lack the vocabulary to fight back. It’s beyond frustrating. It’s criminal.

NOT JUST A GAME

Baseball is a great sport. It’s as American as, well, apple pie. But it’s also a big business. And anyone who forgot that got a rude awakening last week as Boston absorbed the news that General Manager Theo Epstein was leaving the Red Sox.

Epstein’s exit took place amid reports of a rift between him and team CEO Larry Lucchino. One popular interpretation is that the so-called baseball guy concluded he couldn’t co-exist with the business guy. In fact, the moral of the story may be that the athletes the Sox put on the field are just one part of a larger and very sophisticated corporate strategy.

The new ownership — in bringing in players like David Ortiz and Curt Schilling — put together a ball club that finally broke the "Curse of the Bambino" and won the World Series. That’s an achievement of mythical proportions.

But their real-life achievement — reflected in everything from construction of the Monster Seats and ambitious development plans for the neighborhood to its shrewd use of radio station WEEI as a marketing outlet — is to dramatically expand and strengthen the Sox-business brand and wring out as much money as humanly possible from a ballpark with limited seating capacity.

With the second-largest payroll in baseball and as a major player in the free-agent market, the Sox brass have learned a more prudent version of the George Steinbrenner lesson — that it takes real money to compete successfully and keep fans in the seats.

When it comes to Epstein, we have no doubt that the Sox wish things had played out differently. But the Theo saga is about power politics inside a private corporation worth more than $500 million. Sure it was about baseball. But more than that, it was about big business. Fans, who also happen to be Boston and Massachusetts taxpayers, would do well to keep that in mind as they evaluate the various requests the Red Sox are making for "neighborhood improvements," which if made by any other corporate entity would be viewed as a private request for public support.