The Dish

Romney glides forward on his own money and organization skills in Florida.

"We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied," – verse 9 of section 134 in the doctrine and covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.

(Photo: Barack Obama by Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

"Look, you can’t live on the edge of your seat all the time in a war that could last a generation or far longer. If we think we see a bomb in every backpack, the terrorists are winning. But there’s got to be a happy medium. Hollywood doesn’t see it that way. A lot of people have suggested that, pathetically, it’s going to take another terrorist attack to wake us from our slumber. Wouldn’t it be fitting if it were in a movie theater?" – Michael Fumento, lambasting Hollywood’s record in the terror war.

Those are the odds for commutation requests with this usually mercy-free president:

As president, Mr. Bush has commuted three sentences in addition to Mr. Libby’s and denied more than 4,000 requests, said Margaret Colgate Love, the pardon lawyer at the Justice Department for most of the 1990s. He has also issued 113 pardons and denied more than 1,000 requests. "His grant rate is very low compared to other presidents’," she said.

Now recall that Libby’s lawyers had not even formally requested a commutation. The discrepancy is so marked it begs explanation. This really says it all:

"The grounds he offered for commuting Libby’s sentence were equity — that the sentence was out of line with other sentences — or compassion," said Austin D. Sarat, [a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and author of “Mercy on Trial,” a study of executive clemency].  Sarat said. "Those two grounds seem so out of character with anything Bush had ever said or done in the area of clemency that it’s as if he has become a different person."

He didn’t become a different person, because the reason he gave was a transparent fiction. This legal proceeding was rigged from the beginning to save Libby any consequences for perjury. It was rigged to ensure that this president’s lackeys never get held responsible for anything. And that’s something that’s been consistent with Bush for ever.

He’s now going after National Review for being "not helpful." It’s worth knowing that the main criterion for almost everything this fanatic writes is whether it helps his latest candidate or not.

This one got several nominations. ‘I am a man!" Jack Lemmon. Or the perfect response: "Nobody’s perfect."

The most striking result of the ARG poll about the Libby commutation was not just the large number of Republicans ticked off by the president’s abuse of his pardon power. It’s the intensity of the Independent opposition. On reflection, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Independents tend not to think of themselves as protected by group loyalty or a partisan establishment, so they tend to be very skeptical of one side’s capacity to rig the justice system for its own members. Independents get mad at many aspects of the partisan game – from pork to deficits. And the most striking data to come from the polls these days is how many Independents are leaning toward the Democrats. Look at how it might tip even Virginia.  I think it’s less a function of some ideological shift as a shrewd attempt to use one side to police the excesses of the other. If you care about abuse of power, you’ll be anti-GOP right now. That may change. But not for a while.

Bradenton, Florida, 8.30 am.

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In the heyday of the Cold War, the CIA had its fingers in almost everything. Not like today, of course. Among their projects was bankrolling John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 movie of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Alas, Orwell wasn’t completely on message. From an engrossing review at the LRB:

Most problematic … was Orwell’s pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie’s screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm’s mandated ending complemented the new Dulles policy, which – abandoning Truman’s aim of containing Communism – planned a ‘roll back’, at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script’s many advisors put it, Animal Farm’s ending should be one where the animals ‘get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing their oppressors’.

And all in a movie designed in part to warn against propaganda.

(Hat tip: 3QD.)

A reader writes:

One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with Bush apologists is highlighted by the reader accusing you of "Bush Derangement Syndrome", which is just one of their more desperate methods of avoiding debate on substance. These people are afraid to acknowledge that it is possible, even most likely, that citizens develop animosity towards political figures because of things they actually say and do, not because of who they ‘are’ or which tribe they’re from. But as the last six years have shown, once a person is accepted as part of their tribe, it becomes ‘derangement’ to point out any flaw in that person’s conduct, however insignificant.

You have documented this as an authoritarian impulse in your book, but for many Bush followers it isn’t that sinister. They just like their world clean and simple – My Guys vs. Their Guys. The imperative is to quickly diagnose into which camp the political figure falls, and everything beyond that point is a matter of propaganda and name-calling. It goes without saying that there are numerous examples of this mindset on the Left as well.

Like millions of Americans, I was not a pre-9/11 Bush supporter, but gave his administration the benefit of the doubt to proceed responsibly in the War on Terror. When you swallow your pride like that in the name of comity and love for your country only to see it tossed into the Rove/Cheney bag of dirty tricks, yeah, you can get a little upset.