It has been a long time since the federal pardon program was administered in a responsible way -- indeed since President Bush's father's tenure. One would have hoped that President Bush had learned from the fiasco at the end of the Clinton administration that a president ignores at his peril what President Reagan's White House Counsel Fred Fielding called "the housekeeping business of the presidency." If he were to initiate now a serious regime of pardoning, making 15 to 20 grants every couple of months and denying cases that are not meritorious, he could both arrive at the end of his term with a reasonable pardoning record and leave his successor a tidy room.

Maybe the president remembers all the angry Republicans when Clinton issued a round of pardons at the end of his presidency. Maybe he's saving his pardons for Scooter and Karl. More likely, he doesn't care that so many people are serving sentences disproportionate to their crime or character. Forgiveness is not one of the president's virtues.