Bush WILL Issue Pre-emptive Torture Pardons

At Bush's press conference, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the NY Times specifically asked Bush whether he would issue pre-emptive pardons for the criminals in his Administration. And just like Cheney did on Friday, Bush dodged the question:

Q Mr. President, in recent days, there's been a fair amount of discussion in legal circles about whether or not you might give preemptive pardons, pardons in advance, to officials of your administration who engaged in anything from harsh interrogation tactics to perhaps dismissing U.S. attorneys. I'd like to know, have you given any consideration to this? And are you planning on it?

THE PRESIDENT: I won't be discussing pardons here at this press conference. Would you like to ask another question?

If Bush is not planning pre-emptive pardons, he could easily have said so without offending anyone. Clearly Bush does plan to issue these criminal pardons - probably at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 1 minute before Obama swears the oath of office and becomes President.

Will anyone in the Corporate Media or the Democratic Party or even the Big Blogs figure this out? Or am I the only one?

While I'm discussing Bush's last press conference, let me make a few other points.

1. Bush was wired again. He's been wired for every Q&A since the 2004 debates, including all his press conferences and even 1-on-1 interviews with the likes of Candy Crowley. Yet no one in the Corporate Media has figured it out.

2. Bush reluctantly admitted a few errors, but few of them were policy errors - instead they were photo ops that backfired. Bush cited the "Mission Accomplished" sign - but not the mission of invading Iraq based on lies. He cited the photo of flying over New Orleans during Katrina, but not the policy of appointing hacks like HeckuvajobBrownie. In 2004, Bush admitted his "bring 'em on" taunt to terrorists in Iraq was a mistake - but that was a photo op tough-guy pose, not a policy.

3. If there is one person who deserves credit for halting Bush's far-right agenda, it's Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo. Bush said his biggest policy mistake after the 2004 election was taking on Social Security first, rather than immigration. Bush's strategy for looting Social Security was perfectly described by Marshall as "bamboozlement," and Marshall refused to be bamboozled. You go Josh! (BTW Bush lied when he said he campaign in 2004 on a platform of looting Social Security - he may have mentioned it twice in passing but it was never an important campaign issue. Jonathan Singer explains why.)

4. What if Bush promoted immigration reform in 2005 instead of the looting of Social Security? Jonathan Singer takes a stab at counterfactual history:

It's not clear to me that such a move would have necessarily saved his second term -- but it certainly had potential. In this alternative reality, President Bush would have reached across the aisle and pulled in a great deal of support from the Democrats, not only from the party leadership in Washington but also potentially from the party's voters around the country, instead of firing up the Democratic base and shoring up the party's opposition status. Sure, President Bush would have lost some support from his own party, though I do not believe it would have been to the same extent as it eventually turned out to be two years later, when Republicans bolted from the already clearly unpopular President as he pushed immigration reform in the Democratic Congress.

Singer "mis-underestimates" the opposition to immigration reform from the Republican right, which loathes brown people just as much as black people. If Bush had proposed immigration reform in 2005, the attacks from the right (led by Rush Limbaugh and the rest of rightwing Talk Radio) would have been just as fierce as it was in 2006, and the political alienation of Bush's base would have been just as complete.