The Holder Folder

In the spirit of the season, here's one of the many things I'm thankful for this year: Eliot Spitzer's hooker-a-thon. Had he not been caught, I suspect he would have been a major candidate for AG this year, although having both him and HRC arriving from NY might have been a bit much. Given what we now know about his temperament, I think we dodged a bullet.

As for Eric Holder, the one incoming concern seems to be his having commented "neutral, leaning favorable" on Bill Clinton's controversial pardon of Mark Rich. Can we dispense with the hand wringing over this, please? Let's grant that Rich, a fugitive financier who had not exactly exhausted his legal remedies (or even sought them), shouldn't have been pardoned. Fine. But this is a 2 on a 10 point outrage meter. George Bush routinely laps that a dozen times before breakfast. This "scandal" was the product of the late-90s bedwetter media era, when the MSM routinely jumped at whatever Chicken Little panic the GOP cooked up on any given day. Contributions of Rich's ex-wife to a Clinton library are mildly incriminating, at best, and Rich's crimes weren't the world's worst. No, this was a rather routine bullshit end-of-term pardon, much like Reagan's free pass for various GOP contributors, including Steinbrenner, back in 1989. Much worse was Daddy Bush's pardons of the Iran Contra figures just as the investigation was leading up to him personally--a real low point in the modern history of that power. But there was no firestorm, b/c the Dems didn't choose to make one and the press was already bored with that scandal, the sins of which were not falsity or insignificance but complexity and longevity. Expect the coming Bush pardons to be far worse, while getting little media traction. I'm lookin' at you, Scooter!