Anthony Circosta is a decorated Iraq war veteran who wanted to be a police officer when he got home. But he has an assault conviction on his record, so he needed a pardon from the governor of his state, Mitt Romney, to become a cop. The Massachusetts Board of Pardons recommended Circosta get the pardon. However, Romney proudly says he pardoned no one in his four years as Massachusetts governor. The no-pardons-for-anybody policy was undoubtedly supposed to make him look tough and principled. He claimed to believe he shouldn’t overturn the work of juries. (That his policy had the collateral benefit of making sure nobody went Willie Horton on him isn’t going to be mentioned.) But in this case, the policy actually makes him look like like a rigid, vindictive moron: Anthony Circosta was convicted of shooting another kid with a BB gun. The pellet didn’t break the victim’s skin. Circosta was 13 at the time. Nevertheless, Romney turned Circosta down. Twice.

Of course, being a rigid, vindictive moron isn’t necessarily a negative if you’re running for office these days—if you’re running as a Republican, it actually helps. And here’s something else that helps: Romney would consider pardoning Scooter Libby for outing an undercover CIA agent. “It’s worth looking at that,” he says.

No wonder Barney Frank called Romney “the most intellectually dishonest human being in the history of politics.”

Frank’s zinger would have been the Quote of the Day yesterday had it not been for good ol’ Harry Reid, who characterized the Repug presidential field by saying, “I’ve learned one thing in listening to all the debates and reading about all these people running for office, and the one fact I’ve learned, I can’t get out of my mind, is that Rudy Giuliani has been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting.”