Photo on the right is referred to as Going Full Chef Boyardee.

He thought he would be elevated to a position of power.
He ended up being a side model on the White House QVC Network.

A pardon is seen as an acknowledgement that, yes, a crime was committed. I doubt that any of these people want a pardon, because they did nothing wrong.

Wait, wait, now it's South Korea, with Syria and Georgia in the wings....

But definitely not a "deep state" kind of thing.

Of course, it doesn't matter to Gateway Pundit that they fell for a ruse. Their readers are still happy to read that a liberal public figure has supposedly lost it, and those readers will probably pass it along within their echo chambers, promoting GP anyway.

I fear we are choosing to become the United States of Simplicio.

Perry called a big press conference to describe his big goals for the DOE (opening up more oil drilling, etc). It took reporters to inform him, "That's not what the Department of Energy does. You're thinking of the Dept. of the Interior."

He still took the position anyway.

Recall Jan 2017: Trump bragged that his cabinet would have “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”

Obama's Sec. of Energy was a Nobel laureate in Physics. Trump appointed Rick Perry, who barely got his college degree in veterinary sci and didn't know what the Dept of Energy even did.