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Originally posted by ajay:
Back in the days when Governor George Bush was only able to screw-up Texas instead of an entire nation, 57 lawyers representing men – and a woman – on death row requested commutations so that their clients might receive life instead of death.

When approached by lawyers representing mentally retarded inmates, Bush refused.

When approached by lawyers representing inmates whose court-appointed lawyers had slept during their trials, Bush refused.

When approached by lawyers representing men who had committed the crime in question as juveniles, Bush refused.

In each case, then-Governor Bush felt that the defendants had had full and equal access to the law.

But now along comes Scooter. President Bush deemed his 30-month sentence "excessive" and – just like that – commuted his sentence prior to any judicial review. Libby had the finest legal representation. He never expressed any remorse for lying to a grand jury or for his role in the administration's snow job on the American people that led our nation into a war. Yet Scooter is the lucky soul granted clemency by Bush.

In an article for the once-hyped but now defunct magazine, Talk, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed then-Gov. Bush about Karla Faye Tucker, a woman who had recently been executed after he denied her clemency. Bush's response struck Carlson as "odd and cruel" and he described this exchange:

"I watched [Larry King's] interview with [Karla Faye Tucker]…," Bush said. "He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.

'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

Odd and cruel, indeed. Carlson provoked a bit of a media storm for revealing Bush's callousness at a time when – unlike now – he was still viewed as Mr. Compassionate Conservative. (The Bush presidential campaign tried to deny that Bush had made this statement but to no avail.) Bush seemed all the more cruel given that appeals for clemency had been made by figures from around the world, including Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, the Huntsville prison warden and correction officers who testified that Tucker was a model prisoner and reformed, a prosecutor of her accomplice, the brother of one of her murder victims, Pope John Paul II and the European Parliament.

Sister Helen Prejean, one of the preeminent fighters against the death penalty and the inspiration for the film Dead Man Walking, wrote, "Callous indifference to human suffering may also set Bush apart. He may be the only government official to mock a condemned person's plea for mercy, then lie about it afterward, claiming humane feelings he never felt." (Prejean was alluding to George Bush's election-year memoir – A Charge to Keep – in which he wrote that Tucker's impending execution "felt like a huge piece of concrete...crushing me.") Preajan described her response when she was told on Larry King of Bush's final press release before Tucker's execution in which he stated, "May God bless Karla Faye Tucker…." Prejean wrote, "Inside my soul I raged at Bush's hypocrisy, but the broadcast was live and global…. [So] I took a quick breath, said a fierce prayer, looked into the camera, and said, ‘It's interesting to see that Governor Bush is now invoking God, asking God to bless Karla Faye Tucker, when he certainly didn't use the power in his own hands to bless her. He just had her killed.'"

The cruelty described by Carlson and Prejean clearly isn't an anomaly. As veteran political journalist Robert Sherrill reported in a special issue of The Nation on the death penalty: "During his presidential campaign reporters asked [Bush] if he was bothered that some indigents on Texas's death row had been represented by lawyers who slept though part of their trials; he responded with a chuckle."

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Originally posted by ajay:
not talking about her...i'm talking about bush playing God...like he still is today.

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Originally posted by ajay:
Consider the possibility that Bush’s bold defiant action in commuting Libby’s prison time as part of a pre-arrangement guaranteeing his aide’s silence owes to this smug White House usurper’s confidence that there will be no deleterious effect on elections for the simple fact that in 2008, no elections will be held.

Outrageous, you say? But wait! Here is a regime that illegally engineered not one but two election-year coups in order to seize and retain power. There is a wealth of documentation and court cases providing irrefutable proof that the last two presidential elections were massively fraudulent. So right there we have proof of a complete disregard for the democratic elective process.

Next, we have an illegal administration who has so ramped up the fear factor in America in order to force-feed to millions emergency legislation that redresses Constitutional civil liberties, that in hindsight, citizens are only now recognizing this regime’s total disregard for democratic rights. Ignoring, for the moment, the belief among millions of Americans that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were in fact, engineered by CIA agent-provocateurs rather than foreign terrorists, the fact remains that the Bush regime has conducted illegal spying on American citizens, indefinite detainment of suspects, torture up to the point of organ failure or imminent death as standard interrogation procedures, invasive government intervention into citizens private lives, the firing of U.S. Attorneys for strictly political reasons, and countless other egregiously undemocratic exercises unprecedented in American history.

Added to this, we have a regime that committed treason by outing the identity of a U.S. government espionage agent, Valerie Plume, a crime that in the past has had fatal consequences. And this was done as retribution against Ms. Plume’s husband who dared defy the Executive Branch’s gross lies regarding the alleged acquisition of radioactive materials for the development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction by Iraq. With Vice (P)resident Dick Cheney touting the dire possibility of nuclear mushroom clouds spiraling upward over American cities, revelation that Iraq had in fact not acquired such WMD materials would have foiled the Bush-Cheney plan to invade Iraq and seek acquisition of the estimated $5 trillion in oil and gas reserves that they are now intent on seizing via directing Iraqi law via the neo-colonial puppet regime placed in power.

More recently, we have witnessed Bush’s awarding to the company of ex-CEO Dick Cheney a massive no-bid government contract for Halliburton to build internment camps on U.S. soil – the first such prison camps since World War II. The construction of what many consider to be massive barbed-wire detention centers reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps is ominous indeed, considering the government’s invasive practices and irrefutable disregard for democratic civil liberties.

In May, Bush issued an Executive Order conferring upon himself veritable dictatorial power, near complete autonomy to suspend the Constitution, dispatch military troops to round-up and detain suspected terrorists and subversives, and to abolish elections indefinitely until he alone determines that national events warrant a return to Constitutional democratic government. This action violates Constitutional-mandated checks and balances, as established in the 1976 National Emergency Management Act which has now been rendered obsolete.

In June, the government issued notification of the highest potential for terrorist attacks against the U.S., since the pre-September 11, 2001 period. Is the stage being set?

In July, George Bush commutes Libby’s sentence and even declares the possibility of a full presidential pardon, irrespective of its effect on impending American elections.

Why? Considering the pattern of undemocratic actions and election-year abuses by this illegal regime, one wonders if it does not presage the possibility that there are plans afoot to simply suspend the entire process.

In 2007, the fine line between paranoia and real possibility has so blurred that perhaps only a panel of experts including Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley could possibly decide the demarcation. Unfortunately, our most astute interpreters of current reality are all dead.

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Running around saying the sky is falling won't get you rational support.