Katrina vanden Heuvel
from “The Nation”

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.

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