HAD EVEN LIBERALS UPSET

with their fabulous parting grifts, selling pardons at the end of the Clinton term.

But all is forgiven now. After all, what’s the difference between Blago’s Pay to Play senate seat-sale and the Clintons’ Pay-to-Play pardon sale?

A: Nothing, not one thing–except the Clintons have been rewarded for their crimes and Blago won’t be.

Hitch looks at the Clintons’ more recent grifting and says Don’t Confirm Her:

As Bill so touchingly put it [in '92], if you voted for him, you got “two for one.” What the country—and the world—has since learned is a slight variation on that, which I would crudely phrase as “buy one, get one free.” …

In exchange for giving the painful impression that our State Department will be an attractive destination for lobbyists and donors, what exactly are we getting? George Marshall? Dean Acheson? Even Madeleine Albright? No, we are getting a notoriously ambitious woman who made a fool of herself over Bosnia, at the time and during the recent campaign, and who otherwise has no command of foreign affairs except what she’s picked up second-hand from an impeached ex-president, a disbarred lawyer, and a renter of the Lincoln Bedroom. If the Senate waves this through, it will have reinforced its recent image as the rubber-stamp chamber of a bankrupt banana republic.

Andy McCarthy is a Holder hold-out, also:

The Clinton administration’s impressive 1996 overhaul of counterterrorism law happened before Holder ever got to Main Justice. He was there, though, in time to engineer the shocking, politically driven pardons of 16 Puerto Rican separatists — terrorists whose organizations (most notoriously, the FALN) were responsible for over 130 bombings and the murders of innocent Americans; terrorists who hadn’t even applied for clemency or expressed a modicum of remorse (elementary prerequisites for pardon consideration under Justice Department standards); terrorists as to whom Holder’s response was to stonewall Congress when the inevitable questions arose; terrorists whose pardons Holder supported over strenuous protest from victims’ families and law enforcement (including subordinates he brow-beat into muting their objections); terrorists whose pardons Holder urged despite the horrible message this sent in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Moreover, Holder had been acting as Attorney General throughout the final months of the Clinton administration when al Qaeda killed 17 members of the U.S. Navy by bombing the U.S.S. Cole. In response to that al-Qaeda atrocity, the Clinton Justice Department filed no charges . . . even as the department was taking no action against Iranian government operatives who, Justice well knew, had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 members of the United States Air Force were murdered. Charges were finally filed in these cases by the Bush Justice Department.

Holder did, however, contribute to one other terrorist matter: the pardons of Weather Underground terrorists Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans.

Which was why Hillary mentioned The Fresh Prince and Bill Ayers only once during the primary–Obama zinged her right back. McCain, of course, wouldn’t mention it because the VC put him under post-hypnotic suggestion.

The Clintons turned the pardon power on its head. It was meant to be a last resort for the powerless–but they turned it into a first resort for the already-powerful to grab even more money and power. Liberals used to care about stuff like this.

Hillary’s Pardons-for-Votes were worse than the mere money-grubbing by Blago, Bill and her brothers. Hers were Blood Pardons, setting other people’s killers free for personal gain.

Politically corrupt, electorally corrupt, legally corrupt and morally corrupt.

Insane as it may be, it seems that the job of the next Secretary of State is to excuse terrorists and the next Attorney General’s job is to free terrorists. Clinton and Holder have experience in that field that money just can’t buy.

Rent, sure–but not buy.