A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations ...

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford provides our Independence Day rant:

So there you have it. Bush shrugs and smirks and then commutes the easy soft-focus sit-on-your-ass-all-day-and-knit white-collar prison sentence of a hollow political lackey who, in turn, took a bullet for his sneering mafia thug of a boss, Dick Cheney, who in turn was complicit (along with lead flying monkey Karl Rove) in the appallingly illegal outing of a CIA operative, which itself was a tiny but particularly nasty link in the giant chain of lies and deceptions undertaken to lead our wary and tattered nation into an unwinnable impossible costly brutally violent war that will now last, if current estimates are correct, until the goddamn sun explodes.

You have to laugh. You have to laugh because if you do not laugh you will likely be overcome with a mad desire to stab yourself in the eye with a sharp feral cat and/or shoot yourself in the toe with a high-powered staple gun, over and over again, all while tearing out pages of the United States Constitution and crumpling them into tiny little balls and hurling them into the smoldering firepit of who-the-hell-cares as you shiver in the corner and swig from a bottle of Knob Creek and wail at the moon. Or maybe that's just me

... Bush actually ambled forth and said that, while he "respects the jury" in the Libby case, the 2.5 year sentence was simply "too harsh." Baby, if 30 months in a comfy well-stocked rape-free Martha Stewart-decorated facility for compromising national security is too harsh, I've got a draconian little thing called the Patriot Act to sell you, cheap.

Here's a swell side note: You know who gets harsher sentences than 30 months in white-collar prison, George? Pot dealers. That's right. The average sentence for a convicted marijuana dealer in California is 3.3 years. In real prison, George, not that namby-pamby Club Fed where Scooter would've played badminton and sipped tea for two years. Hell, in places like Oklahoma and Alabama, you can get a life sentence for possessing a single marijuana bud, which is ironic indeed, given how if you live in Oklahoma or Alabama, there is nothing that would serve your miserable id better than to be deeply and thoroughly stoned every single day and twice on Sunday. But that's another column.

Be sure to read the rest of Mark Morford's column, "Scooter Libby In Hell: What do Dick Cheney, Paris Hilton, "The Sopranos" and colon spasms have in common? Find out here."