Texas Tough

As governor and president, George W. Bush has presided over and approved the executions of the mentally ill, mentally retarded, adults convicted as juveniles, and perhaps the innocent—not to mention the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands. With the exception of the White House’s Thanksgiving turkey, however, he has rarely encountered a defendant he deemed worthy of mercy—until today. On July 2, 2007, the President decreed that his Veep’s trusted aid and fellow warmonger, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, should not spend a day in the clink for his role in the agent-exposure/WMD-hoax scandal.

Fair enough, I say. Still, I would have preferred the President give an honest account of his decision. Instead of releasing a mumbo-jumbo memo on the legal merits of the case, why not tell the truth: that Scooter was doing W’s dirty business and that it would have been dishonorable to let him rot while his bosses continued steering the ship of state further into the muck. In his deflecting commutation statement, Bush carries forward one of the most unsavory characteristics of his presidency: a startling unwillingness to take responsibility for any misstep, whether frivolous or grave. With 43, the buck always stops down there.