“PRESIDENT PARDONS TURKEY.”

This is the kind of headline that has appeared almost every Thanksgiving since President Truman allegedly started this silly practice some six decades ago.

Modern times have added a relatively new wrinkle: online voting to name the reprieved gobblers. Only 28,000 voters were idiotic enough to participate (this year’s winner: the cringe-inducing “May” and “Flower”). Fortunately there were no hanging chads or irregular dangling wattles that might have drawn the Supreme Court into the process.

The photo of President Bush with the turkey immediately leads one to momentarily wonder which one is the real “turkey,” though the answer is obvious: The turkey is the only one in the photo that can be pardoned.

Given the disaster that is this president’s administration, no pardon could possibly be granted to the human in the photo. The millions of Iraqis now living as refugees, the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the thousands of maimed American soldiers, and the several thousand American dead — not to mention the billions of dollars wasted — leave this president unpardonable and a figurative turkey in his own right.

It is not just the numbers, of course, but the fact that this was a war that should never have happened. It is a war that the president and those serving him started by manipulating the public and the press. It is a war that Alan Greenspan recently wrote was about securing oil supplies.

It is a war for which this country will pay in a multitude of ways for years and perhaps decades to come. This leaves this president not only unpardonable, but also persona non grata in his party and in the nation, as well as feared and/or despised in much of the world.

In another sense, the annual pardoning of the turkey should be dropped immediately on humanitarian grounds. The Great Turkey Pardoner once led the nation in executions and prided himself on that dubious distinction. To have the former Texas governor, who rejected countless pardons for humans, lampoon the pardoning process on the White House lawn is at best tasteless.

One wonders how funny this all seems to the relatives of those who sought pardons from Governor Bush, to now have to watch as President Bush takes part in this silly and pointless exercise.

Please, no more saving of turkeys from the death penalty, at least until the death penalty has been eliminated in this “civilized” nation.

Sixty years of turkey pardons is at least five decades too many.