I’m using shaky, stolen wi-fi at my mom’s house in sunny Pittsburgh, PA this week, and it’s been much easier to get my news from the idiot box than the internets. So I read the President’s statement accompanying his commutation of Scooter Libby‘s in between outages and then gave up. I guess I didn’t really internalize his reasoning until I was watching the respective, but not respectful, morning shows on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The “splitting the baby” analysis was in full swing, but the bloated talking heads (when did CNN replace my buddy Soledad O’Brien with her younger and just as annoying twin?) kept repeating Bush’s justification: that the sentence was “excessive.”

Setting aside the fact that the sentence was well within sentencing guidelines, you still have the simple fact that if Bush considered 30 months excessive, he could have let Scooter serve any number of days between 1 and 899 before commuting or pardoning. Not one of the “journalists” on cable news this morning thought to even bring that up.

Now that this is all done except for the collecting, I’ll be glued to the TV awaiting Bush’s commutation of Don Siegelman‘s sentence. All in the game, no?