Dog Whistle

President Bush called his decision to commute the sentence of Scooter Libby "fair and balanced" today for a very specific reason. He wanted to let the base know that their best interests were at heart, and that he'll be extremely likely to pardon Libby on his way out the door. This language of "fair and balanced" is extremely evocative and everyone knew what he was talking about. He was saying it was a fair decision in the way that Fox News is a fair network. He's admitting that the fix was in and giving a wink to his pals by letting them know that they would be protected too. It was the verbal equivalent of his smirk, and as far as I'm concerned it's a direct admission of obstruction of justice, or at least as direct as you're going to get with him.

One way to counteract this is to say to the President that, as long as he's being fair and balanced, he must immediately sequester himself in a room and take a look at all of these other federal sentences of similiar value, and decide if they need to be commuted as well. It's the only fair and balanced thing to do. And this should be said with a mocking tone, along the order of OJ looking for the real killers. "The President is holed up right now with the list of all federal perjury felons, scrupulously weighing the evidence like Solon and determining who must stay in jail and who must leave. Such wisdom and such essential fairness! We may need another President to step in while Bush undergoes this Herculean undertaking... oh wait, we've got someone handling that.

I would hand-deliver petitions for redress from hundreds of perjury felons to the White House in the interest of fairness and balance. I would convene "mock grand juries" on the Capitol steps and lie to them with impunity, since the President is honor-bound to study and commute my sentence. I would put up a graphic of the two sides of the balance sheet with respect to Libby: "On the one hand, he lied to a federal grand jury and FBI investigators and obstructed an investigation into outing a CIA covert operative which reached up to the OVP and possibly the President himself. On the other hand, he's a friend."

Let's tie this "fair and balanced" theme right around the President's neck. It's already seen in liberal and even independent circles as not so much a phrase but a punchline. Time to roll it out. We can play dog-whistle politics too.

UPDATE: The usage of "fair and balanced" to give this dog whistle was so clumsy and obvious that many liberals may shrug it off, much like Catherine Tremell in Basic Instinct writes a book about a murderer who uses ice picks, so how could she possibly be doing the same kind of murdering. Only an idiot would be so blatantly obvious!

As I was saying....