I’ve been pondering President Bush’s work toward bailing out lenders, auto makers and other low-rent purveyors of Made-in-USA crap.

For the record, these leading lights of free-market enterprise make Chinese producers of melamine-soaked and lead-covered products look like Swarovski crystal figurines for sale in a Paris salon.

And after much time spent on my recently-returned plastic-and-wood bench that sits out in front of my high-class Upper Valley hacienda, I have come to conclude that Bush is the greatest Presidential pardoner this country has ever seen.

He has, in fact, forgiven more — in terms of time served and monetary value, than all other Presidents combined, including Warren Hardinge, who pardoned “priests and prostitutes alike,” and the notorious Ulysseses Grant, who pardoned two turkeys right before Thanksgiving because he was sloshed and seeing double after cavorting with, well, prostitutes and priests.

Here in West Texas, a lot of cavorting goes on — some of it is fun and some of it is legal. But folks around here lack the high morals of Capitol Heights, the financial capital of fiscal Fred Flintstones, and the political wherewithal of party-centric wingnuts (both left and right) to really do it big. First off, you’ve got to put on a dull suit with a bright tie and head to DC to even get near the door of an Official Administration Pardoning. And the Men’s Wearhouse off Sunland Park Drive just doesn’t cut it with the elites.

Did you get that, Anthony Cobos? or any other of you get-the-vote-out by having your relatives shill for you on street corners near voting stations rednecks?

I mean, who wants to do all that expensive haircut, multiple suit-fittings, acne-reducing-medications-from-a-TV-ad stuff, when every house in the neighborhood is putting on tamales and posole for New Year’s, and the fridge on the back porch is full of Bud Light plus a 6-pack of that weird microbrew the egg-head son brought back from Austin?

Not me, not even if being in the political mix is valuable to a New York Times blogger who laments Obama’s break with tradition during his Hawai’i holiday. Heh — didja read that, Roy Ortega? An MSM icon has a regular blog — kinda like yours but, well, without the anti-blog attitude, though that MSM icon bitches about as much as you did recently, only with a better thesaurus.

Am I off-track already? Must be the wood splint in my backside from that bench. Need upgrade to varnish, I guess.

Now. I’m sitting here on one buttock and wondering where the bailout for unfairly-convicted and really unfairly-sentenced US Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Campeon is. I hope it’s not locked up in Committee, in some back-alley klaven Komittee led by our famous Border Patrol alum, US Congressman Sylvestre Reyes. If Reyes is weighing in on anything more than where Pitt players should go for good food in El Paso, then Ramos and Campeon are screwed. Hell, who knows what Reyes is up to these days. His “blog” (cue interest from Roy Ortega) is even worse than Ortega’s, but yet better, since he doesn’t slag off bloggers on a blog.

Reyes must be in a really bad place about Ramos’ and Compean’s convictions. On the one hand, he understands — better than anyone else on Capitol Hill — the pressures of the Border Patrol agent’s job, as well as the scum that USBP agents deal with every day. The lies, the drugs, the violence…

On the other hand, he has to have learned, by now, some rudimentary sense of politicking.

The man must be just torn apart by all this.

Or not. Silver knows who butters his bread (that’s anyone with a higher IQ than he has, which is about 434 other Congressmen), and he must know who won’t allow him sit on a plastic-and-wood bench in front of a high-class hacienda in the Upper Valley.

So we all make our choices, and so does he. Border Patrol Agents make choices every hour of every day they’re on duty. Reyes makes choices. His political handlers, the California idiot Pelosi and the California idiot Feinstein, call his shots more than he calls for shots at Acetunas.

Now. Is there a pardon out there for a New York Times MSM blogger who thinks he has the right to follow Obama all over the white sandy beaches of Hawai’i? Is there a pardon floating down for a guy in a bad suit hoofing it to Congress to ask for a few billion for his dumb American car company that makes cars Americans don’t want and who indirectly supports a golf club-owning union that car customers aren’t allowed to visit?

Hell, is there a pardon for a plastic-and-wood bench that sits outside a high-class hacienda in the Upper Valley, for sticking it (so to speak) to not only its owner but any politician who happens by? Is there a pardon for a politically-obsessed, under-performing, Border Patrol agent-prosecuting, wannabe up-and-comer attorney named Johnny Sutton, whose traditional resignation (as is traditional for all US Attorneys when a new Administration comes into office) should not only be accepted, but accompanied by a deportation order?

And mostly, is there a pardon for US Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two of the most wrongfully-convicted and over-sentenced citizens, who got ten years for what should have been, at best, misdemeanors, or, more likely, administrative findings?