Justice Antonin Scalia is at it again.

"For Pete's sake, if you can't trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life!" he said Wednesday, replying to an audience member at the University of Connecticut who asked about Scalia's refusal last year to sit out a case involving his hunting partner, Vice President Cheney.

Scalia had similar advice to a student in Switzerland who asked last month about the Supreme Court's ruling for George W. Bush during the 2000 election. "Oh, God. Get over it," he said.

And, on March 27, he answered a Boston Herald reporter's question about criticism of his conservative religious beliefs by putting his fingertips under his chin and flipping them dismissively outward. "That's Sicilian," the high court's first Italian American explained, triggering a controversy that would spill over to cable TV and prompt a testy letter to the editor of the Herald from Scalia himself.

One of the most conservative -- and cerebral -- of the nine justices, Scalia, 70, has never shied from verbal warfare.

But as he completes his second decade on the court, Scalia, often known by his nickname, Nino, seems less inhibited than ever, speaking frequently off-the-cuff, in a crowd-pleasing voice quite unlike that of the legal academy to which he once belonged.

It is the voice of a conservative populist: combative, humorous, and sharply critical of the media and of the legal establishment atop which he sits. That includes the Supreme Court, from whose rulings in favor of gay rights and against the juvenile death penalty he dissented vigorously but in vain.

But what's really interesting about this story, and totally unremarked by the WaPo reporter, is that the supposedly brilliant legal mind of Scalia has, once again, completely missed the essence of the American system of government, which was specifically set up so that the the people would not have to rely on trusting their government officials to do the right thing.

A trifucated division of the Federal government and a system of checks and balances between them was designed to insure that something besides an official's personal ethics would keep them under control. When that breaks down, because, for instance, party loyalty is held to be more important that oversight, or due to unchrecked corruption, or because ideological precepts or committment to special interests overwhelm common sense, necessity and practicality, then we all suffer.

For Scalia to blow off an obvious conflict of interest by saying "trust me" insults the intelligence of the American people, and thumbs his nose at the purpose of the Founding Fathers in setting things up the way they did. It's no surprise that to Scalia results are more important that principle, what's a surprise is that so relatively few people have noticed, and that he still retains a reputation as a deep legal thinker. Whatever he once was, now, he's just another right-wing politician.