Pardon My French

Ah, it's that time of Olympiad. The time when a lame-duck president issues pardons with little political fallout. So who is and who isn't getting a pardon?

Donald Rumsfeld

After a bipartisan Senate report unanimously concluded that Rumsfeld and other Administration officials were directly responsible for abuses committed at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Amnesty International was afraid Bush would grant them a blanket pardon:

After eight years of defiling America's reputation and renouncing our founding principles, the Bush administration wants to jet off into the sunset without answering to the American public...One of our three main objectives during President-elect Obama's 100 days is to ensure an independent commission investigates abuses committed the U.S. government in its "war on terror". Pardoning key officials, or even worse, issuing a blanket pardon, would undermine this critical goal towards restoring our commitment to human rights.

But White House officials have said that such pardons are unnecessary; that would imply that what those officials did was wrong and illegal. You gotta love these guys.

Especially Keith Urbahn, a Rumsfeld spokesman. (Someone still likes Rumsfeld enough to work for him?) Said Urbahn of the Senate report, "It's regrettable that Senator Levin has decided to use the committee's time and taxpayer dollars to make unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation." Yeah, right, it was a political hit job. That's why all twelve of the Republicans on the committee went along with it.

Isaac Robert Toussie

Toussie was a real estate scammer who helped a hundred people illegally qualify for HUD-sponsored mortgages. His father donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee. And on Christmas Eve it was announced that he would be receiving a presidential pardon.

Presidential pardons, once granted, are irrevocable. But Toussie's pardon had not yet been executed. And due to popular opposition, President Bush directed the Pardon Attorney not to execute it.

Talking Heads

From the New York Times:

Hidden behind [the] appearance of [the] objectivity [of retired generals-cum-network analysts], though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

But would retired generals really put a positive spin on the situation in Iraq just to maintain favor with the Pentagon?

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General [Paul E.] Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

War and Politics

Daily Kos' Michael Clark sure draws interesting analogies. Mostly citing his support for the surge in Iraq and his deference towards President Bush at a recent press conference, John McCain is apparently Hubert Humphrey to Bush's LBJ and will thus experience the same sort of political failure in '08 that Humphrey did in '68.

Meanwhile, New York Times' Stanley Fish makes an equally interesting but opposite argument--McCain's positioning on Iraq would help him win a general against Barack Obama:

On the one hand, [McCain] voted to authorize the invasion. On the other, he consistently disagreed with the administration’s prosecution of the war in general and with the judgment of defense Secretary Rumsfeld in particular. And on the third hand, he advocated for a course of action that was at last implemented in the so-called “surge,” and with some success.

So, at any moment, he would be able to present himself as a strong patriot, and at another moment as a critic of the hard-line hawks, and at still another as a hard-line hawk with more experience and military knowledge than the others...

[Obama's stance is] inflexible and without nuance. McCain can ask, 'Don’t you see that the situation has changed in recent months, and shouldn't a responsible leader adjust his or her stance according to the facts on the ground?' And he can add, 'I too had my doubts about the conduct of the war, but now a policy I long advocated has been put in place with good results.'

I think neither Clark nor Fish are completely right. I think Iraq will definitely be a liability for McCain. Sure, he could argue that the surge has helped reduce violence in Iraq, but the main purpose of the surge was political reconciliation. The greatest achievement the Iraqi Parliament has to show for itself is adopting a new flag...that the Sunnis refuse to fly. Obama would argue that the only thing that would allow reconciliation in Iraq is the realization that American troops will not be there forever, despite McCain's rhetoric of a 10,000-year occupation.

I also believe McCain would try to paint himself as "patriot/critic/hawk," and not be yoked by Bush. But Fish overlooks one thing: I was alive in 2004; does he really expect me to believe that the American electorate would choose the flip-flopper over the resolute?