HYPOCRISY AND CHUTZPAH

“Anybody who watched presidential spokesman Tony Snow face a pack of snarling White House press corps correspondents following President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence will understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy... Then there was Mrs. Hillary Clinton, who had the gall to issue a statement saying, ‘Today’s decision is yet another example that this Administration simply considers itself above the law. This case arose from the Administration’s politicization of national security intelligence and its efforts to punish those who spoke out against its policies. Four years into the Iraq war, Americans are still living with the consequences of this White House’s efforts to quell dissent. This commutation sends the clear signal that in this Administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.’ Said Tony Snow: ‘I don’t know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it.’ Here, after all, is the wife of a president who all but peddled pardons to an assortment of felons and miscreants including one malodorous fugitive from justice who had renounced his American citizenship. Doesn’t this woman recall that on her husband’s last day in the White House he signed 140 pardons and several commutations?”

—Michael Reagan