Until a very short while ago, few had heard of Scooter Libby. Today, still not a celebrity with the larger public, he carries on his shoulders the full weight of charges against the administration in the Wilson/Plame matter. Convicted of lying, he is not really reviled for that. It is his hand in a plot that he has been asked to answer for: a plot against war critics who have taken the administration to task for the mishandling, mismanagement and misrepresentation of war intelligence. But Libby, the only one in the law's grasp, is the only one to pay the price.
Bush's opposition has braced for a pardon and its rage at the prospect is building. To Bush's antagonists on left, a pardon would be only another act in the conspiracy -- a further cover-up, a way of getting away with it. But this is the entirely wrong way of seeing things. A pardon is just what Bush's opponents should want.
A pardon brings the president into the heart of the case. It compels him to do what he has so far managed to avoid: accept in some way responsibility for the conduct of his Administration in communicating with the public about national security and in its treatment of dissent. If the pardon would be politically explosive, then this is what the administration's critics, hungering for accountability, have been waiting for. The case against this government on the larger charge of abuse of power is diminished, made even laughable, by resolving into a 30-month sentence for an obscure figure named Libby.
First of all, I've known who Scooter Libby was for a long while now, as did many with an ear to politics in this country. But that's a minor point. The sadness of this article is that someone who claims to be a progressive minded individual thinks this crap would actually do something worthwhile. I'm sorry, but Bush swooping in to save Libby with a pardon would not implicate the President in wrong doing. Nor would it force him to take some responsibility. He would just claim what every Republican lap dog has been saying since the indictment, that Libby wasn't really committing a crime or that it was a rogue crime of a man who gave great service to the country and deserves to be free of punishment. These arguments hold no water of course, but since when has any argument from the GOP had to actually mean something to be accepted by the press? The argument to kill off 3 grand of our soldiers still doesn't have a backbone and yet media pundits still praise the decision to go to war in Iraq.
Digby says it well also:
Well, that's a slick argument --- if you happen to be a 12 year old. (General counsel? Really?) A Libby pardon means that Bush will finally be paying the price for his administration's Iraq war because he will have to take the heat. Right. My question is, from whom? Atrios? Jane Hamsher? Because I don't see that anybody in the press will say much, and there certainly will not be an uproar. They are, after all, implicated in this case and have every reason to portray the pardon as the reversal of a miscarriage of justice, which is exactly how it is being sold. And now that major Democrats seem to be actively supporting the pardon in some byzantine plan to make Bush "look bad" (as if he cares) it would seem that "accountability" means never having to say you're sorry.
...
Presidential fingerprints are already on this case, as everybody knows, and which historians will have no problem finding. After all, Libby worked in the white house and was a special counsel to both the president and vice president. I don't think we need to worry about the "case" against the Bush administration's Iraq lies dying with Libby's prison sentence. It's a pretty big case.
The idea that Republicans paid a price for their previous pardons is laughable. In fact, they paid such a huge price that one of the people Bush senior pardoned is working in the white house today! The "political significance" was that it encouraged Republicans to commit crimes while in office knowing that there will be no price to pay. I'm not sure why Democrats should find this a positive, but that's just me.
Ever since Nixon, the Republicans have been getting away with criminal behavior when they are in power. Nixon was allowed to resign and was pre-emptively pardoned. His minions all took their punishment like men, however, and did their time without complaints. But that was the last time. After the multiple crimes committed in Iran-Contra --- big ones, to do with national security and unconstitutional executive power-grabs --- the Republicans decided they had nothing to lose by pardoning their criminal underlings and so they did.
Once Bill "he's not my president" Clinton was elected, the rules changed of course, and they tried to run him out of office with endless partisan witch hunts and impeachment over consensual sexual behavior. For the coup de grace, they had a full-blown hissy fit over his pardon of Marc Rich --- who was represented by Scooter Libby! Now they are clutching their pearls once again about a Republican being the victim of the long arm of the law and the pundits (and now some Democrats) are whining about how he must never see the inside of a jail because he is such a fine fellow and the horrible Republican appointed prosecutor was out to get him.
So excuse me for being skeptical that a pardon will somehow blow back on Bush. Of course it won't. Bush will instead be (temporarily, perhaps) rehabilitated by his party and considered a thoughtful statesmanlike gentleman by the press for having the compassion and decency to spare someone of Scooter's superior humanity from rubbing shoulders with hoi polloi.
I don't know why Scooter is so damned special that everybody in Washington is having the vapors over the fact that he may have to do time. (I know if I were Jack Abramoff, I'd be a little bit miffed that nobody is lifting a finger after the tens of millions I'd funneled to all my good friends.)I mused yesterday that it was because the town elders are circling the wagons around one of their own, and I think that's part of it.
But it appears that this is actually something more and it's beginning to smell very ugly to me. The political and media establishment are making an explicit argument that high level Republicans really should be held to a lower standard than other Americans --- the exact opposite of the argument they made in the Clinton impeachment, where they insisted that a non-material lie about a private sexual matter in a dismissed case was so important that it required a duly elected and successful president be removed from office. Perhaps the problem is simply that the it's a capitol full of lawyers, who tailor their arguments for each individual case. Unfortunately, the only client seems to be the Republican party.
Read the rest of his post, I don't want to steal too much from other bloggers today.
No comments:
Post a Comment