By Jonathan Tallman:




Prepare the Congressional committee rooms and fill them with reporters, they are going to be getting a lot of use within the coming month.  President Bush has dared to use his constitutional power to commute a political sentence for former Cheney Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby.  The outrage over the common presidential move is already blazing out of control, and once Congress gets back from its summer break, expect it to only get worse.

Article II of the United States Constitution says that the president has the unreviewable power to grant "Reprieves and Pardons" for all offenses against the United States.  It has already been established that the crime Mr. Libby committed was against the United States, so President Bush is covered in that respect. 

So what is it that is making this such a controversy over-running the airwaves with every newscast?  As usual, it is nothing but politics.  The Democrats are trying to make something out of this because they realize that President Bush's approval rating is at a dismal 35%, and that 67% of the nation opposed the president pardoning Libby.  The ferocity at which they are going after the president with, however, is out of this world.  I would urge the Democrats to look at the record as it is.  President Bill Clinton, the human form of an angel to the liberal elite, pardoned/commuted about 450 people, and as we established above, he had every right to do so.  Of those people, there were drug dealers, those who obstructed justice, arms dealers to American enemies like Iran, and worst of all, sixteen members of the FLAN, a terrorist group that was reported to have blown up nearly 120 bombs on American soil.  On January 20, 2001 alone, President Clinton granted 140 pardons and 36 commutations before leaving office later that day.  I have gone back in the records and I could not find Speaker Pelosi speaking out against those, nor did Senator Hillary Clinton.  Senator Clinton referred to the "cronyism" in the Bush Administration, and yet not one reporter following Clinton's campaign dared to ask how she could say that with the record of her husband as president.

The media tells us that 67% of the nation disagreed with a Libby pardon, and is there any surprise?  Any thing that President Bush does at this point is wrong, and it isn't that those polled believed that Libby shouldn't be pardoned, it is that they connected Mr. Libby with the Bush White House, and therefore, he must be guilty and must go through with his punishment.

The media is showing its absolute hypocrisy with this issue.  It is humiliating to think that the media can't put aside their bias for just a spare moment to deliver the whole truth to the American people.  As Democrats speak out, no reporter asks the tough questions, no reporter brings up past administrations concerning pardons, and the bias goes on.  The facts are in: constitutionally, President Bush did something within his powers.  He made a decision to help spare a public servant's reputation, or the little that was left of it for the good of him, his wife, and his young children.  President Bush helped prevent a man from going to prison because of a political power play put out by an ambitious prosecutor.  The first attempt was taking out Karl Rove, it failed, then Vice President Cheney, it failed, and then finally the next best thing, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.  Sadly, the prosecutor succeeded in that endeavor, and thankfully the constitutional power granted to President Bush lowered the horrible sentence that Libby was expected to fulfill.  President Bush should be commended for his move, and the liberal media should begin telling both sides of the story, but sadly, neither of these will happen anytime soon.