Excuse me? Pardon me?

Assuming the worst case for "Hot Karl" Rove (i.e., the White House gets pinned down on the particulars, and Rove is accused of treason), he would still have a way out: A presidential pardon.

My friend Steve, whom I will someday convince to become a regular contributor but who for now occasionally throws a paragraph of wisdom my way, has this to say on the prospect:

i'm excited about the potential development that it may have been karl rove who disclosed the identity of our cia agent. if i had a blog, i'd start raising the question of whether or not bush will pardon rove for this. in retrospect, kerry should have forced bush during the election to promise that he wouldn't pardon anyone who committed the treasonous act of leaking the name of one of our cia agents. my bet is that bush will pardon him, and i just hope that voters make the republicans pay for it.

I think we all share in that excitement, but the point about the likelihood of a pardon (and the lost opportunity to nail down W on this issue) is a sobering one: This administration has shown itself to be more or less entirely without conscience when it comes to matters of material significance (e.g. the justification for war against and occupation of Iraq), so spinning the pardon of Karl Rove as somehow legitimate would be a trivial matter.

In the recent revelations about Mark Felt/Deep Throat, someone (whose name I can't remember) pointed out that without Democratic control of Congress during the Nixon years, the word "Watergate" would be just the name of a hotel. With a Republican in the White House, the GOP in control of both houses of Congress, and an American public that has demonstrated its willingness to look the other way as log after log gets tossed onto the bonfire of mendacity...what's the best we can really expect?

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Excuse me? Pardon me?

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