Category: The Dish

Marc Ambinder is following the Clintons around in Iowa. Photos here. Here’s Clinton’s latest pitch.

Remember that? It was the name of Bush’s campaign jet in 2000. Try not to laugh too hard. David Corn sees the wider lesson of Bush twisting the law to protect his friend and apparatchik:

Libby had become a symbol of the Bush White House’s problem with the truth. After all, his lies had been designed to block FBI agents and federal prosecutors from learning the full truth of a White House effort to discredit a critic who had accused the Bush administration of twisting the prewar intelligence. And now the final act in the long-running CIA leak scandal–Bush’s commutation–stands as another symbol of this grand theme: lying doesn’t really bother this crowd. In the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush claimed he would bring responsibility to the White House and, as a PR stunt, he dubbed his campaign jet Accountability One. Yet with this commutation, he takes the position that in his administration an aide who purposefully misleads government officials investigating a possible national security crime need not be held fully accountable.

Giuliani’s turnabout on Libby is a fascinating moment in his own political evolution. A reader writes:

It was Giuliani’s office that prosecuted Marc Rich. Here’s Giuliani on Rich’s pardon:

Well, I’m shocked that the President of the United States would pardon him. After all, he never paid a price. He got on an airplane, took all his records, and ran off to Zug, Switzerland, where he’s remained a fugitive, and has made untold efforts to try to get the charges reduced, including many, many overtures and entreaties based on the use of influence.

Libby, of course, represented Marc Rich. There really is a different set of standards for the wealthy and connected isn’t there?

The Ron Paul campaign is the first to launch an iPhone platform for their web-based campaign. "The iPhone is an exciting technology that will help us reach potential voters across the country," states eCampaign director Justine Lam. "The Ron Paul campaign continues to utilize new technologies to spread Dr. Paul’s message of freedom, peace and prosperity."

The former prosecutor lets a white collar criminal off the hook. Rudy’s part of the problem as well, it seems. The campaign press release:

"After evaluating the facts, the President came to a reasonable decision and I believe the decision was correct."

She is not going to be front and center of this critical battle to highlight the profound corruption at the heart of this presidency. She was among the last Democratic candidates to respond last night – long after Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. Why? Because of her husband’s grotesque abuse of the pardon power at the end of his presidency. Just a small reminder of the baggage Clinton carries, baggage that will prevent her from either fully exposing the abuse of power under this administration or ending it if she were to become president. Everything in Clinton’s past, after all, suggests that she will quite eagerly accept Dick Cheney’s transformation of the executive branch into a rampart of secrecy, executive privilege and personal will. These were her hallmarks in the White House as well. She shares with Cheney an obsessive fixation on her own secrecy, a paranoid suspicion of her political opponents, and a desire to use all the powers at her disposal. I don’t think she can be a credible critic of this administration’s contempt for the rule of law. And I don’t think she can be a credible antidote to it either. If Democrats believe otherwise, they’re fooling themselves a second time around.

A reader writes:

You and your reader are precisely right.  But more to the point, the American approach of hyperbolizing the threat not only unnecessarily (and cynically) terrifies the public – thereby achieving the ‘terrorists’ aims for them – it also elevates the perpetrators into potential heroes for those Muslims who would imitate them.  Instead, we should be denigrating them as the clowns they are.

The effective response is not to declare every kook with a pipe-bomb-dream an existential threat to the country’s survival.  They aren’t.  The proper response is ridicule.  Nothing can deflate the would-be terrorists’ pretensions to power than more embarrassments like this past weekend.  Every time they are stopped, the mantra should not be "What’s coming next?" but rather "Seriously. What a bunch of losers."

It’s one thing to die walking in the shoes of Saladin. But who wants to blow themselves to bits only to be written off as an ineffective fool? They want to be warriors of God. Don’t encourage them by overstating the threat. Expose them as the petulant failures they are. The best way to fight the viral nature of this stuff is not by making it an epic battle but by making it a mundane one.

Can they do damage?  Yes, though a gun or two would probably be more effective and efficient than these duct tape and chewing gum contraptions they failed to set off this past weekend. Let’s not abase ourselves by putting them on par with Hitler and stoking their sadism and megalomania. They are clowns. Laugh at them.

A quick poll finds 60 percent of Americans oppose Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence. 40 percent of Republicans oppose it. If the case against the above-the-law president is made cogently and clearly, those numbers can go up. It’s up to Democrats and those conservatives who still believe in the rule of law to make the case against the degeneracy in the White House.

We now have a clear and simple illustration of the arrogance of this president. Tell the American people the core narrative of this monarchical presidency: this president believes he is above the law in wiretapping citizens with no court oversight; he has innovated an explosive use of signing statements to declare himself above the law on a bewildering array of other matters, large and small; he has unilaterally declared himself above American law, international law, and U.N. Treaty obligations in secretly authorizing torture; he has claimed the right to seize anyone in the United States, detain them indefinitely without trial and torture them; his vice-president refuses to abide by the law that mandates securing classified documents;  and when a court of law finds a friend of the president’s guilty, he commutes the sentence.

Most Americans find this blatant abuse of power repugnant – war or no war. Many find the way in which the commentariat has been coopted in defending this lawlessness to be equally repugnant. When a governing class declares itself collectively above the rule of law, and does so with open contempt for the judicial system, it’s time that elite was brought down a peg or two. I think Bush just gave the country a simple reason to rid Washington of him and all he stands for. We will now see exactly what character Americans are made of: supplicants of a feather-bedded aristocracy or self-governing citizens under the rule of law?

Get angrier.

The man was appointed by the Bush administration to seek out justice. The trouble is: he actually did his job. When he found perjury, he prosecuted perjury. It was not a close call. The president did not consult with the prosecutor in commuting Libby’s sentence. Why should he? He’s the decider. The rule of law is no contest when you have the Decider superseding such quaint notions of equality before the law. And so Fitzgerald is forced to issue the following statement:

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive." The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

National Review was in a much better position to judge the culpability of their good friend, Scooter Libby, than a mere jury of his peers:

The perjury charge was based on discrepancies between Libby’s grand jury testimony and that of a few journalists who contradicted him. Libby argued that the discrepancies could be explained by differences in memory. Although the jury disagreed, a reasonable person listening to the faulty memories of the witnesses who testified could have concluded that Libby simply had things mixed up.

The Wall Street Journal editors also know better than the jury:

Mr. Libby got caught in a perjury net that we continue to believe trapped an innocent man who lost track of what he said, when he said it, and to whom.

If it’s a choice between the rule of law and one of their best buddies actually going to jail, you know they’re going to throw the rule of law out of the window. Remember that these are the same people who wanted to remove Clinton from office because of perjury in a civil suit. But Clinton wasn’t one of them, was he? The corruption of the political class is one lesson of this case. The total corruption of much of the "conservative" journalistic class is another.