We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites - the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.
It is well-known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - once Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser - has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.
Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places - including his boss Dick Cheney - outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand into the eyes of truth. "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered," wrote the chief prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton - a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-toss-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush - called the evidence "overwhelming" and threw the book at Libby.
You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to "free Scooter."
Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as "a man ... of personal integrity" - without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.
"A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being," said Donald Rumsfeld - the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. "A good person" and "decent man," said one-time Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, who had predicted the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Paul Wolfowitz wrote a four-page letter to praise "the noblest spirit of selfless service" that he knew motivated his friend Scooter. Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, who had claimed Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" and that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction." The same Paul Wolfowitz who had to resign recently as president of the World Bank for using his office to show favoritism to his girlfriend. Paul Wolfowitz turned character witness.
The praise kept coming: from Douglas Feith, who ran the Pentagon factory of disinformation that Cheney and Libby used to brainwash the press; from Richard Perle, as cocksure about Libby's "honesty, integrity, fairness and balance" as he had been about the success of the war; and from William Kristol, who had primed the pump of the propaganda machine at The Weekly Standard and has led the call for a presidential pardon. "The case was such a farce, in my view," he said. "I'm for pardon on the merits."
One Beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving - "weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness" of Libby's sentence.
And there's the rub.
None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing "in the nobility of this war," wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a "casualty" - a fallen soldier the president dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.
Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.
There are contrarian voices: "This is an open-and-shut case of perjury and obstruction of justice," said Pat Buchanan. "The Republican Party stands for the idea that high officials should not be lying to special investigators." From the former governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, a staunch conservative, comes this verdict: "If the public believes there's one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system."
So it may well be, as The Hartford Courant said editorially, that Mr Libby is "a nice guy, a loyal and devoted patriot ... but none of that excuses perjury or obstruction of justice. If it did, truth wouldn't matter much."
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Bush's First-Person Perspective
Michael Winship
There's a famous, possibly apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson visiting Vietnam during his presidency. On a carrier flight deck, he started striding toward a helicopter when a Navy officer said to him, "No, Mr. President, your helicopter is this way."
LBJ looked him in the eye and said, "Son, they're all my helicopters."
A similar story on a slightly smaller scale made the rounds of Washington during the early days of the current presidency. It was in April 2001, after China seized and then released a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft. During a medical appointment the doctor asked George W. Bush what had been the most difficult part of his presidency so far. He replied, "When the Chinese took my airplane."
Fast forward more than six long years, post-9/11 years of disasters at home and abroad, incompetence, abuses of power, stonewalling, obstruction of justice, etc. (I could make a longer list but it would paralyze you like the monologue of that guy in "Forrest Gump" who goes on about all the ways you can cook shrimp.)
You'd think that with such a shambles in his wake and his popularity at an all-time low, George Bush would at least partially have relinquished his pride of ownership. Not so. Here he is the other day, responding to the aborted attempt in the Senate to legislatively declare "no confidence" in Attorney General "Fredo" Gonzales:
"They can try to have their votes of no confidence," the president said, "but it's not going to determine—make the determination—who serves in my government."
My government? Now that's entitlement. And you thought George Bush didn't have a vision for America. Unfortunately, it's one big MySpace page, from sea to shining sea. Or, rather, shining me.
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Tight Democratic Race in Iowa
In Iowa, a new Mason-Dixon poll shows the three Democratic frontrunners deadlocked in a statistical tie for first. Sen. Hillary Clinton leads with 22%, followed by John Edwards at 21%, Sen. Barack Obama at 18% and Gov. Bill Richardson at 6%.
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Congratulations to Senator Dodd, he was the only Democrat featured on the talk shows this past Sunday! Fair and Balanced reporting Bullshit. It appears to me that all the Sunday morning bovine excreators are Republicans and why not they are all millionaires they know from which party their tax cuts come. All that crap about a liberal media is just that crap.The Washington Post which for decades favored the Democrats has gone conservative in it's editorials and its columnists. Now whether the TV hosts are conservative because of the bias of the conglomerants who own their respective stations or because of their own political leanings is hard to say. But recently Tim and Chris, you know who they are, came down heavily on the Democratic Candidates for not showing up on the Fox debates. Truly the only non conservative face and voice you will see and hear on the tube is Keith Olberman. Bless him!
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