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7/6/2007 3:33 AM

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To show the colossal arrogance of President Bush in commuting the prison sentence of Louis "Scooter" Libby, consider the following presidential statement:

"The reason the framers of our Constitution vested this broad power in the Executive Branch was to assure that the president would have the freedom to do what he deemed to be the right thing, regardless of how unpopular a decision might be."

This was just like Bush - asserting his moral superiority by claiming to be doing "the right thing" - to claim that one of the reasons for granting a pardon or a commutation is "a belief that a sentence was excessive or unjust." Putting himself above the law, as usual.

Oh, wait a minute. That wasn't Bush. Those statements came from former President Bill Clinton, writing in The New York Times to defend the 450 pardons and commutations he handed out during his two terms. But it wasn't the number that was at issue - Ronald Reagan granted nearly that many - it was the controversy over two in particular.

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On his last day in office, Clinton pardoned 140 people and issued 36 commutations. Two of the pardons went to financier Marc Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, who were indicted in 1993 for tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Before they could be brought to court, they fled to Switzerland and remained on the FBI's Most Wanted List for many years. (In a strange twist, Rich's lawyer at the time was Scooter Libby, and Clinton actually cited Libby's advocacy as one reason for the pardons!)

Before the pardons, Denise Rich, Rich's ex-wife and the mother of his three children, had made about $1 million in donations to Democratic Party causes, including $450,000 to the Clinton Library and $70,000 to Hillary Clinton's 2000 campaign for the Senate. But the former president insisted there was no quid pro quo , that the pardons hadn't been bought.

As a condition of the pardon, Rich had to pay a fine of $100 million. But considering that as of 2006, Forbes listed his net worth at $1.5 billion, that amount would mean far much less to him than the $250,000 that Libby is required to pay as part of the sentence that styands.

One critic complained that, "This commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice."

Before Clinton's admirers object, that quote wasn't about the Rich pardon. It came this week from Sen. Hillary Clinton who was speaking about Bush. Hypocrisy always was a problem with the Clintons.

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