McBride getting soft on crime?

What happens when you write at 3:26 a.m.?

You produce something like this:

He was convicted of lying to investigators about conversations with reporters he said he couldn't remember well over something that wasn't a crime and that he didn't leak first after an investigation that started out as a partisan and media witch hunt after the administration tried to defend itself against the smears of an ideologically motivated critic.

More worrisome than her incoherent writing style is the evidence that lock-em-up McBride is getting a little soft on crime.

She wants to pardon Libby, who clearly broke the law. What's a little case of perjury among friends?

And she doesn't see why conservatives aren't defending Gen. Vang Pao, charged with masterminding a plot to violently overthrow the government of Laos. The arrest came as Vang and others were allegedly preparing to send hundreds of machine guns, ammunition, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-tank rockets, Stinger shoulder-fired missiles, mines and C-4 explosives to be used against the Laotian government.

McBride says:

I am not sure what the U.S. government should do about Vang Pao. I understand that you can't have people running around engaged in shadow foreign policy...

But I will say this: Ronald Reagan's Justice Department would never have brought these charges.

Here's one reason, or a few thousand reasons, that the U.S. government may have felt the need to bring those charges:

"We are looking at conspiracy to murder thousands and thousands of people at one time," Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Twiss said in court.

What Gen. Vang did as a U.S. ally during the Vietnam war does not justify killing Laotians now -- even if the government there happens to be communist. Apparently, even George W. Bush agrees.