As has been a tradition since the days of President Harry Truman, President George W. Bush… As has been a tradition since the days of President Harry Truman, President George W. Bush pardoned a Thanksgiving turkey Monday. This year’s beneficiary, Katie, will live out the rest of her days protected at Frying Pan Park’s Kidwell Farm in Herndon, Va.

Setting aside the hypocrisy of pardoning one turkey and then gobbling up another, the editorial board at The Pitt News has decided, in the spirit of the season, to issue a few Thanksgiving pardons of our own.

To begin, we’d like to pardon Michael Jackson. Regardless of what he did or didn’t do to any as-yet unnamed young boys, he’s transcended the boundaries of normalcy so much that it would probably be better for everyone if he spent the rest of his natural lifespan pecking at grain in an enclosed pasture.

Next, we offer a tremendous pardon to Pitt football head coach Walt Harris. He’s done a tremendous job taking a team from disarray to respectability, and we hope he doesn’t accept any other tremendous job offers.

We offer a pardon to Pittsburgh’s recent weather. Clearly it’s suffering badly from schizophrenia. Plus, if we pardon it, maybe it will go away.

The onion family has been suffering greatly in light of the recent hepatitis outbreak. We offer a pardon to Vidalia, white, yellow and every other non-green onion. We still love you.

Darby Conley, creator of the comic strip “Get Fuzzy,” and originator of Pittsburgh’s smell-related uproar, earns a pardon. Having recently set foot in South Oakland, we are forced to concur about the smell.

We’d like to offer Chancellor Mark Nordenberg a pardon for, well, everything. There’s no way one man could have caused everything he gets blamed for.

Not to shock anyone, but journalists have been known to occasionally knock back a beverage or two after a hard day’s work. To that end, we’d like to offer a pardon to the fine Banker’s Club line of bottom-shelf liquor. It’s fair to say that all of us have, at some dawn or another, cursed the existence of the Banker. We take it all back, and we’ll see you soon.

We offer a pardon to the Steelers. After such a long and glorious tradition of excellence, we guess it’s okay for them to blow.

We’d like to explicitly not pardon Penn State. We find them guilty, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of sucking. Sentencing will be carried out Dec. 6 at the Pete.