FOUR MORE YEARS! (ON YOUR PRISON SENTENCE). Are conservatives growing soft on crime? In addition to the aforementioned conservative complaints about the way cops are persecuting Rush Limbaugh, we now have NRO's Andrew Stuttaford defending some poor corporate accountant who got an extraordinarily harsh sentence for what are apparently crimes against money (the prosecution recommended stiff sentencing because the guy's fraud "eventually resulted in more than $500 million in Dynegy stock losses").

Granted, the perps in question are not the worthy targets of justice seen on Law & Order and NYPD Blue -- scruffy, ill-behaved, and frequently ethnic. But anything that causes right-wing factota to veer slightly from Nixon's Prime Directive (Law and Order is a winning issue never to be abandoned by the GOP) is remarkable.

This clemency fad at first appears to have reached its peak as the famously doctrinaire and unthoughtful Kathryn Lopez points to a story about new and outrageously lax warrantless search standards in New Orleans. If a cyborg like Lopez begins to worry about overreaching prosecutions, might a watershed have been reached?

Alas, K-Lo's self-correcting mechanism pulls her back from the precipice of blasphemy: "Has John Ashcroft been blamed yet?" she jokes.

We're sure Ashcroft had not direct role in the New Orleans case, as he is presently too busy for that -- to some extent with the 9/11 Commission, but mostly with the centerpiece of his own brand of judicial activism, mandatory sentencing. Ashcroft, it is well known, closely monitors sentencing by judges across America, searching for and correcting any deviation in the draconianism his office has perscribed. When his hounds notice such shortfalls, correction is swift, as Buffalo Senior District Judge John Elfvin discovered when the Feds ordered him to more stringently resentence a tax evader and a drug dealer he had let off, in their view, too lightly. Elfvin told the Buffalo News, "I thought [Federal sentencing] guidelines were guidelines, not mandates. Now I'm told they're mandates, and I have to proceed on that basis."

While I doubt the Attorney General directly called the Louisiana Fifth Circuit judges with suggestions, I can see how his administration's emphasis on harsher sentences and more of 'em would embolden judges (the right kinda judges, if ya know what I mean) in such a course, as it emboldens prosecutors to reach ever further, ever deeper in the quest for more prison years with which to notch their belts. In that kind of "justice" system, why wouldn't they conduct more searches, however specious, and seek decades-long sentences out of accounting-fraud cases? So what if some of the brethren momentarily object that what they do is cruel and unnecessary? They aren't the ones holding the gun and the gavel.