Unpardonable Hypocrisy

NY Post

White House press secretary Tony Snow didn't mince words last week:

"I don't know what Arkansan is for 'chutzpah,' but this is a gigantic case of it," he said of criticism by both Bill and Hillary Clinton of President Bush's decision to commute I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence.

And that's putting it mildly.

The Clintons aren't the only Democrats who've attacked the president for the Libby commutation. But they're surely the most hypocritical.

"This commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice," wailed Hillary.

Hmm. Back in 2001, when her husband left office by extending outright pardons and/or clemency to 176 people, all she had to say about it was: "It's a presidential decision."

Apparently, Bill Clinton's pardon of his own brother (a cocaine-trafficking conviction), as well as of folks who'd paid Hillary's brother tens of thousands of dollars for presidential clemency, had nothing to do with "cronyism."

Oh, but there's a difference, claims Hillary. "This was clearly an effort to protect the White House," she said. As opposed to, say, Clinton's pardon of Susan McDougal, his one-time Whitewater business partner, who sat in prison for 18 months rather than testify against the Clintons?

As for the former president, he charged that the commutation "is consistent with [the Bush administration's] philosophy; they believe that they should be able to do what they want, and that the law is a minor obstacle."

Now, that's an especially interesting observation - given what Clinton himself had to say back when his own pardons, made in the closing hours of his presidency, caused bipartisan outrage.

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Clinton wrote that under the Constitution, a president has "broad and unreviewable power" to grant pardons "without limit" - including, he noted, out of "a belief that a sentence was excessive or unjust."

This right, the ex-president wrote, "is inherently controversial," but was made "to assure that the president would have the freedom to do what he deemed to be right, regardless of how unpopular a decision might be."

And in a direct precedent for the Libby case, Clinton noted that he granted some pardons "because I felt the individuals had been unfairly treated and punished" by a special prosecutor - just what Bush and many others came to believe about prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

"I want every American to know that, while you may disagree with this decision, I made it on the merits as I saw them, and I take full responsibility for it," wrote Clinton of his pardon for politically connected rogue financier Marc Rich.

Which is about what George W. Bush is saying about his commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence.

Case closed.