Friday morning rant/fatigue/stop raining dammit!

More rain. Argh. So this Friday I look at the world through dreary eyes--sleep deprived eyes.

Building on last night's post on this problematic president, a couple of notes.

First, from yesterday's presser when the President defended his commutation of Scooter's "excessive sentence" he drew the attention of the Republican judge who laid down that sentence.

Also yesterday, Bush's statement that he had commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence because it was "excessive" drew a quizzical response from the trial judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton. In an opinion ordering Libby to begin serving supervised probation, Walton noted that the prison term was "consistent with the bottom end" of federal sentencing guidelines.

"The court is somewhat perplexed as to how its sentence could accurately be characterized as excessive," Walton wrote.

"Although it is certainly the president's prerogative to justify the exercise of his constitutional commutation of power in whatever manner he chooses," Walton wrote, ". . . the court notes that the term of incarceration imposed in this case was determined after a careful consideration of each of the requisite statutory factors."

Bush did not discuss his reasoning in depth yesterday. "It's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House, and it's run its course and now we're going to move on," he said.

Yeah, move on. Nothing to see here.

Add to that Bush's statement:

"I'm aware of the fact that perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of that person, and I've often thought about what would have happened had that person come forth and said, 'I did it.' Would we have had this, you know, endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter?"

That would be a great question to pose to your chief political advisor, wouldn't it, George? Wouldn't you like to ask Karl if he could have stopped all this investigation?

Withdrawn.

But this is the guy who constantly refers to "his government." Remember when Leahy chastized Taylor for saying she took an "Oath to the President?" Well, an alert Sullivan reader points out that this is typical for this President:

"This president often mentions his oath but never talks about protecting the constitution. On the contrary, he regularly talks about his oath to protect the people, or to protect America. But it's possible to justify any number of tyrannies in the name of protecting the people."

There seems to be a big disconnect between this President and our basic constitutional principles.

****

On issues of feminism, a couple of notes. First, from the ridiculous world of beauty pageants comes the even more ridiculous story about Miss New Jersey having to beg to keep in the pageant after having the audacity of horsing around with friends fully clothed. She is blackmailed by someone and then has to plead for her position and admit that what she did was not very ladylike. Whatever.

But then again, there is this story about a Taekwondo star who took up the sport to get her father's attention. You see, Daddy dearest didn't care about his daughter when all she did was excel in academics. But once she started sports, then he became aware. The entire story is sad--in how it is written and the glimpse into an aspect of masculinity that most of us thought was a relic of the past.