Bill Kristol: Hacktacular!

See, this is what you get when you put your principles in a blind trust (emphasis added):

In this week’s Weekly Standard, editor Bill Kristol writes that Bush must pardon Libby immediately. “If the president does intend to pardon Libby, there is no reason to wait,” he writes.

Well, uh ... actually, Bill, you sanctimonious hack, there is (again, emphasis added):

The Problem With Pardoning Libby
President Bush may well pardon Scooter Libby. But he’d have to flout Justice Department guidelines in order to do it.

... there’s one significant roadblock on the path to Libby’s salvation: Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff does not qualify to even be considered for a presidential pardon under Justice Department guidelines.

Following the furor over President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich (among others), Bush made it clear he wasn’t interested in granting many pardons. “We were basically told [by then White House counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales] that there weren’t going to be pardons—or if there were, there would be very few,” recalls one former White House lawyer who asked not to be identified talking about internal matters.

The president has since indicated he intended to go by the book in granting what few pardons he’d hand out—considering only requests that had first been reviewed by the Justice Department under a series of publicly available guidelines.

Those regulations, which are discussed on the Justice Department Web site at www.usdoj.gov/pardon, would seem to make a Libby pardon a nonstarter in George W. Bush’s White House. They “require a petitioner to wait a period of at least five years after conviction or release from confinement (whichever is later) before filing a pardon application,” according to the Justice Web site.

Yes, it's going to be entertaining to watch the troglodytes in Lower Wankerville explain how this case is, well, you know, different. I mean, they always are, aren't they?

AND THERE'S MORE: As you knew there would be.