The Daily Background

Carpetbagger does a superb job of deconstructing Tony Snow’s op-ed in USA Today today, but I think he’s missed one point. Snow writes, defending the Libby sentence commutation:

The Constitution gives the president the power to grant clemency in a wide range of cases, at his discretion, with no restrictions. In the final hours of the Clinton administration, this unfettered authority was embodied in a mad rush to push through pardons with dizzying haste — 141 grants on Clinton’s final day in office, part of 211 in the final nine weeks.

To which Carpetbagger replies “Tony Snow managed to wait until the second paragraph to say, “Clinton did it!” Let’s all applaud Snow’s impressive restraint. He only got six paragraphs to make his case, and he devoted one of them to an irrelevant tangent.”

There’s a problem with this though. To brush off Snow’s argument in this way (”he’s just pointing out that ‘Clinton did it too’”) is to accept that Snow’s gist (along the lines of “Clinton did it too, and even worse”) is essentially correct. The problem, of course, is that it is not correct at all. Clinton never pardoned or commuted the sentences of one of his aides after said aide was convicted of multiple felonies and sentenced to years in prison.

Snow’s point is, as Carpetbagger writes, “an irrelevant tangent,” but more than that: it’s also a misleading one, which relies on a false comparison and the suggestion that Clinton did exactly the same thing that Bush just did, and received a double standard in response (although the latter suggestion is just silly, because Clinton got hounded every bit as much as Bush is being criticized right now). There is of course also the point to be made that just because somebody else does something wrong, that doesn’t make what you’re doing any less wrong, even if you were doing the exact same thing.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog