Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle justly takes Bush to task for the puny mercy he exhibited in the limited pardons he granted last week.

"Those sentences are peanuts compared to the sentences being served by many first-time nonviolent drug offenders in the federal system this Christmas. Laws that were supposed to put away drug kingpins have been subverted so that drug dealers can turn in the help and get soft time, while their gofers may serve decades-long sentences."

"If, in 1986, Congress had told the public that it was passing a sentencing law that looked to be tough on kingpins but in fact would enable the biggest drug players to avoid long sentences, Americans would have been appalled. If the public had understood that the only true check on prosecutors who are harsher on petty criminals than high-level drug dealers would be the presidential pardon, Congress (one would hope) would have been too ashamed to pass the legislation."

"If Congress didn't know what it was doing then, federal law enforcement knows all too well now what the law has wrought: Get-out-of-jail-free cards for kingpins; and despair for their dupes."

"Only one man in America has the power to end these injustices and insure that the punishment fits the crime. How it breaks my heart that George W. Bush, who is such a giant, has limited himself to meting out pardons to bootleggers and a man who rolled back an odometer. It is beneath him."