In 2003, the affirmative action aspect of the University of Michigan’s admissions process for undergraduate and law school students became the subject of U.S. Supreme Court review. President Bush urged the court to replace any race-based considerations with merit-based ones. The U.S. Justice Department filed briefs promoting schemes in states such as Texas, where the top students at high schools are granted automatic admission to state universities.

As Bush put it back then, “At the undergraduate level, African-American students and some Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African-American, Hispanic or Native American.”

So it’s odd that his own Justice Department was hiring attorneys based solely on ideology, not merit. Top graduates from schools such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford were passed over because the deciders feared they were liberals. Meanwhile, applicants with scruffier resumes had a much better chance of being hired if they were affiliated with conservative-leaning organizations, such as The Federalist Society.

They got far more than 20 points; they got the jobs. The inspector general for the department recently deemed these hiring practices illegal.

Just imagine the seething bile boiling inside Bush now that he’s learned that the department arguing for merit in college admissions was aggressively dismissive of it when it came to hiring its own lawyers.

Well, you’ll have to imagine it, because he has yet to express any outrage.

Not too slick. Sen. John McCain picked a strange place to tout his new position on the offshore drilling of oil. In 2000, he supported the federal moratorium that’s been in place since 1981. But on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, Calif., he called for the ban to be lifted so that states could decide.

Santa Barbara was the site of a massive oil spill in 1969 when a drilling platform in the ocean ruptured, spewing 200,000 gallons of crude. Beaches were ruined. Birds and aquatic animals died by the thousands. The disaster helped give rise to the environmental movement and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

McCain is also touting the building of nuclear power plants as part of a promised overhaul of the nation’s energy policy. There’s certainly merit to that, but I wouldn’t recommend a town hall session at Three Mile Island.

Timing is everything. On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged to its lowest point since September 2006. Memo to McCain: Probably not the best time to talk about private accounts for Social Security.