Reuters

THE past week has been a terrible one for America's embattled president. First, on June 28th, his own Republicans scuppered his cherished—and, in the view of this newspaper, enlightened and brave—plan to reform the country's broken immigration system, decisively blocking it in the Senate. Then a group of prominent Republican senators joined forces with the Democrats to speak out against his policy of reinforcing Iraq. And on July 2nd George Bush brought fresh waves of vitriol down onto his own head, by annulling the 30-month prison sentence given in June to a top White House aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Mr Libby, a former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, was convicted in May in a complicated case that revolved around the leaking of the name of an undercover CIA agent to newspapers. It was claimed that this was an attempt to discredit the agent's husband, a former diplomat who had challenged the Bush administration's case that Saddam Hussein had been seeking materials to make nuclear weapons. The court did not find that a crime had been committed in the leaking. Disclosing the identity of an undercover agent is a serious offence, but only if the disclosure is deliberate. But it did find that Mr Libby had been repeatedly untruthful in his answers to questions about the affair, rejecting his contention that these were honest errors of recollection.

Mr Bush did not pardon Mr Libby outright, saying that he accepted the verdict. But he did quash his 30-month sentence on the ground that it was too harsh (though it was imposed by a judge Mr Bush had himself appointed, just as the case against Mr Libby had been brought by a prosecutor appointed by the administration). Mr Libby now walks free, and his $250,000 fine will surely be met by the rich Republican supporters who campaigned for his pardon. Yet perjury and obstruction of justice are very serious crimes. Even Paris Hilton, the wags are noting, had to go to jail for a few days.

Of course, there is hypocrisy on all sides in this matter: Democrats ought to remember that Bill Clinton was never punished for having obviously perjured himself over his activities with Monica Lewinsky. And commuting sentences and issuing pardons are constitutional rights of any president. But they are ones that should be used sparingly: remember the Republican outrage when Mr Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive financier, and his own half-brother Roger?

A dangerous freedom

Mr Bush's action serves to remind people of three of his weaknesses. One of them is his tendency towards cronyism, which led him to appoint a wholly unqualified friend to run the government's disaster-relief agency. The consequences were disastrously manifest during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Other examples include his failed attempt to appoint his own lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. A second flaw is the hold that Mr Cheney appears to have over the man who is nominally his boss. The past few days have seen a series of articles in the Washington Post detailing the extent to which Mr Cheney has talked Mr Bush into bypassing all normal channels of debate to take questionable decisions.

A third effect of the decision, and perhaps the most serious, is that it reinforces the perception that Mr Bush sees himself and his cronies as above the law. Sometimes he has made this explicit, attaching “signing statements” to hundreds of bills sent to him by Congress asserting his right to interpret those bills as he deems fit. Sometimes he has done so covertly, wire-tapping Americans with no authorisation or permitting the use of torture with consequences felt at Abu Ghraib and in secret CIA prisons in black holes like Uzbekistan.

Perhaps, in the end, Mr Bush's decision came down to a simple calculation that he has little left to lose. He is not seeking re-election, his approval ratings can barely go any lower, and any hopes for legacy-polishing bipartisan co-operation with Congress seem to have evaporated. So why should Mr Bush not please his few remaining friends and placate his vice-president by springing the loyal Mr Libby? It makes a kind of sense, but a deeply troubling one. What else, one wonders, might so isolated a president do before he goes?