Bush: good, or not?

In today's New York Times, Adam Liptak offers a way to judge Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence. He reviews Bush's record of pardons and commutations when he was governor of Texas. And guess what? It was "at odds with his decision in the Libby case."

After doing his research, Liptak outlines Bush's thinking when he refused clemency for children and people with learning difficulties who were on Death Row. He only commuted one death sentence, and let 152 executions continue. Liptak interviews a law professor, who scrabbles about, searching for some legal principle that might describe Bush's reasoning. “As governor, Bush essentially viewed the clemency power as limited to cases of demonstrable actual innocence." Therefore, we are encouraged to conclude, Bush commuted Libby for dubious reasons.

This article reminds me of oddball social science research you occasionally hear about, where people work out whether the French eat cheese, or whether men are more violent than women. Common-sense conclusions, bolstered by academese. The article takes a blindingly-obvious hypothesis and tests it by laborious counting. In conclusion, Liptak tentatively suggests that Bush's decision might not have had much philosophic legitimacy.

But it's obvious that Bush is incapable of and resolutely opposed to acting on principle. He operates on the level of posture, executing the weak and damaged to be "tough on crime," and pardoning Libby to reward a picciotto who didn't rat him out.

The New York Times finds Tony Snow's Goebbelsite refrain - that Bush spent "weeks and weeks" deliberating over the case, and came to a decision derived from objective and abstracted reasoning from legal principles - wanting. Of course! And by testing Snow's claims - that Bush might be a competent and decent person - Liptak infers that they have enough legitimacy in them to test. We all know this isn't true.