Scooter Libby:Let Freedom Ring for Liars Who Lie for George

Knowing fairly well, because we've come to understand our President, that Scooter Libby would be pardoned before long, I'm certain that I'd have little to say that would shock you.

Do you remember my post from a couple weeks ago?

Libby: Pardon or Not, Lose-Lose For Bush
June 18, 2007

If Bush pardons Scooter Libby, it will be as if to say, "Thank you, Scooter, for doing my administration's bidding in covering up the circumstances of our outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent who was working out there on America's side. I am not on America's side by pardoning you for participating in outright lies about the CIA agent outing. Instead I'm showing that I'm on the extreme partisans' side."

If Bush fails to pardon Libby, it will anger and alienate the 20-something percent of that new brand of Republicans who prize loyalty and protection of a President who embraces their divisive and extreme ideology over punishing those who participate in what what looks like treason or something dangerously bordering upon treason.

To a typical American, whether Republican or Democrat, who believes that intelligent patriotism still fosters a spirit that supports a healthy democracy, truth, and respect and reasonable protection for all Americans who do dangerous and important work on behalf of our national security while under cover, it looks like Bush loses.


YOUR COMMENTS BACK THEN:

- "I think that is true, Jude, but we liberals will see it that way in a stark and clear way. How will it be spun to the people in the middle? [Or has rove-run politics evacuated the middle?]"

- "Bush doesn't care about public opinion and he doesn't care about the affects of anything he does, as long as oil is in his pocket."

- "I think the politics of a Libby pardon, have less to do with winning elections than for certain higher-level White House officials to avoid conviction and prosecution themselves. It was George senior who pardoned the principals in Iran-Contra, when he himself was one of the principals in the adventure."

How is this being spun by middle-of-the-road media?

Last March, a very sympathetic (and stragely compassionate) Michael Kinsley at TIME had this to say about Scooter's choices and opinions about his expected pardon:

[Libby] had good reason to fear that if he told the truth, he might go to prison. There is a law against "outing" a covert CIA agent. That law might or might not have applied in this case. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ultimately decided he couldn't make the charge stick, but Libby didn't know that when the FBI came calling. He gambled that lying was safer, and he lost...

....start piling up all the lies told by this Administration in advancing its war in Iraq. Rank them in importance. Where would you put Scooter Libby's unconvincing faulty memory about who told what to whom about Valerie Plame Wilson? Not very high, I think. If President Bush has a shred of humanity in him — if he has suffered even a tiny moment of doubt about this huge and tragic mess he has gotten our country into — how can he let the clock tick him out of office without pardoning a very small player in this tragedy, but the one who happened to get caught?

Kinsley has already framed Bush as a man of compassion for letting this crook off the hook.

But the biggest crooks got away with what they did to Valerie Plame without so much as one public accusation of treason from mainstream media.

I repeat, they got away with it. Libby was the tiny fish...the virtual tadpole. The big picture is the picture that counts, but because of the way mainstream media handles the issue, most people may never really make the big-picture connection.

While some understandably angry bloggers are screaming for impeachment today, the elite mainstream media, afraid for their own positions of "royalty" within the White House press corps, have, for too long, skirted the issues that would have caused the public to understand the serious nature of offense when many people within a President's administration are complicit, in any way, shape or form, in revealing the covert identity of a CIA agent. See William Rivers Pitt's "The Most Insidious of Traitors" from September 2003

So they'll cover their negligent and timid tails by making the pardon of Scooter Libby look inevitable.

I still have faith, somehow, that most people who pay attention will understand what happened here - even if MSM has nearly completely failed to tell the hardest part of the stories. A live poll at MSNBC is currently showing that 73% of repondents do not agree with Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence. When asked by an LA Times poll, "Do you agree with Pres. Bush that 30 months in federal prison is excessive for telling a lie?", a whopping 92% of respondents currently say "NO".