My Airing of Grievances, part one:

December 23rd is not yet upon us, but the Airing of Grievances can not wait. We shall begin with an unreported and little known fact about Barack Obama, here after referred to as President Punk Ass Bitch, or PPAB for short.

Every one knows (or ought to know) that Presidents have the power to issue pardons. Few among us think much about it, but it can be an important tool for writing past wrongs and correcting injustices. Of course, it can also be used to cover for cronies and sycophants. Either way, until recently, it was common for the President to issue dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pardons per year. In fact, the American Constitution Society, a conservative legal think tank, notes that:

Until 1980, each president granted well over a hundred post-sentence pardons and sentence commutations almost every year, without fanfare or scandal. Grants were issued almost every month for much of this period, evidence that pardoning was considered part of the ordinary housekeeping work of the Presidency, not something reserved for holidays or departure from office. The percentage of clemency petitions acted on favorably remained high, approaching or exceeding 30% in every administration until President Jimmy Carter’s. While it would be naive to suggest that special pleading outside of regular channels never entered into a decision to pardon or commute a sentence, irregular grants rarely gave rise to controversy as long as ordinary people were perceived to have access to the president’s mercy.

Well, PPAB just issued his first pardons, after 700 days in office. Nine of them. What nine injustices roused the great twelve dimensional chess player from his lawyerly slumber? What errors and excesses of our hallowed judicial system prompted him to raise his pen? From Pardon Power Blog:

682 days into his presidency, Barack Obama, the slowest Democratic president in history to exercise the pardon power, has finally discovered the dark corners of Article II of the Constitution by granting 9 pardons. Why, even William Henry Harrison, who only served 32 days before dying, found a way to grant 3 pardons!

The retributive justice hawks in the Department of Justice must be mighty proud of Nixonian law-and-order smack down that has kept this AARP-like group at bay for decades. Poor 73-year old Russel Dixon ... his liquor law violation was more than 50 years ago (that is to say, before Obama was even born)! James Banks, now 66-years-old, was 27 when he got caught stealing plywood and nails from a construction site. Yes, you read that right! The horror! Ronald Foster, now 65-years old, committed his crime when he was an 18-year-old Marine serving in Vietnam. But Foster clearly had no business being eager for mercy, given the utterly shocking, heinous nature of his crime (whittling the edges of coins so as to trick vending machines). Thus, his application, filed in 2008, still required 32 months to process.

Six of these nine pardons never even did time for their minor offenses.  So we have yet another window into the right-leaning ivory tower that PPAB inhabits. President Obama is well on his way to rivaling George W. Bush as one of the least merciful presidents of all time. Of course, he has made his intentions perfectly clear since day one - he believes in Imperial Presidency, as much or more than Nixon or Bush I and Bush II. There is no justice in him. Meet the new boss...