There's relief but no long-term reassurance from the Supreme Court's principled 5-3 repudiation of the administration's military tribunals

So the Supreme Court has turned thumbs down on the administration's military tribunals as violations of U.S. law and the Geneva conventions. The 5-3 vote is a relief, but not much reassurance for the future.

For one thing, it's really a 5-4 vote. Our new bullyboy chief justice, whose existence seems governed by the principle "I never heard of a really powerful person I didn't want to suck up to," couldn't vote because he already had, as an appeals court judge who cheered the kangaroo courts on. So the Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas alliance is not only intact but apparently growing ever more cohesive and more militant by the day.

[Confidential to the jackasses with all their "inside knowledge" who tried to tell us that Alito wasn't going to be "Scalito": Have you gotten your heads far enough out of your asses to tell us whether you were in on the con all along or you're merely too-stupid-to-live morons?]

What's happening is that, as I suspected, the authentically "conservative" Anthony Kennedy is going to be driven to the side of sanity with increasing frequency by the pack of bloodthirsty, rampaging judicial hoodlums sitting to his right on the Court. As a holding action, that provides us with a thin margin of protection. But there seems less and less reason to think that there's any limit to how far to the right the Pack of Four is prepared to move the Court. As soon as they get one more reliable vote, watch out! It looks like they're prepared to write a previously unimagined book of "The History of Judicial Activism on the Bench."

For now, let us bow our heads in prayer, for:

• the continued health of 86-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, and

• the replacement of Joe "Bring On the Loons" Lieberman in the Senate before the next Supreme Court nomination.

Final thought: Since the 750-plus signing statements that Chimpy the Prez has graffito-ed onto bills he's signed into "law" tell us that he considers "laws" nothing more than "Congress's opinion," is there any reason to think that the Bush crowd pays any more attention to Supreme Court decisions it doesn't like?