Matthew Yglesias comments on Diane Feinstein's endorsement of Bush's pardon of two border patrol agents who shot an unarmed drug dealer in the back as he was walking away:
I don't really understand what the relevance of these considerations are supposed to be. I take it that the federal maximum security prisons are filled with people who aren't “low-level wrongdoer[s] who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But still if you were to wade into such a prison and go on a killing spree, that wouldn't be okay. It would be a big deal! Mass-murder! There's no special rule where it's okay to shoot at people as long as they're “bad guys.”
One of the governing principles of the Bush administration was that there are special rules and that the government isn't bound by the law when it comes to dealing with "bad guys." This defeats the point of having authorities who aren't above the law, but it's essentially the same argument we've been having about torture and warrantless wiretapping. It really isn't surprising that some Democrats are more ambivalent about this stuff than they let on previously.
-- A. Serwer
