The Dish

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.

Jonah Goldberg, a member in good standing of the conservative elite, argues that Bush wasn’t personal enough in deciding what is and what isn’t justice:

Having just watched Joe Wilson sputter in pompous rage on the Today Show, I’m tempted to argue that Bush should have used eminent domain to take Wilson’s convertible Jaguar and give it to Scooter Libby.

And so the connected and the privileged go to bat for their friends among the connected and the privileged. The rule of law is for the little people. But all in good fun, of course. Jeez, don’t you have a sense of humor?

Matt Yglesias drools over the possibility of getting the entire country under the government’s healthcare thumb. Medicare is a particularly revealing program idea in this respect. At a deep level, the left sees all of us as the equivalent of senior citizens, dependent on the benevolence of government for our needs and wants. Of course, they will provide our needs as they see fit – they’re good people, you know. And so much smarter than the rest of us. There will be none of that wasteful drug spending we now have. How dare Americans spend their own money on treatments they actually want? It’s inefficient! This remains the key template for liberals: citizens as permanent supplicants. Those who do manage to look after themselves? Don’t worry. They’ll tax you till you really do need the equivalent of Medicare. And expect you to be grateful for it.

David Brooks’ column today can only be described as an embarrassment. More in the morning. It seems to me that Orin Kerr gets it right:

As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as "overwhelming" and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.

Er, yes. But we know why they are claiming this absurdity. He’s their friend; and he’s critical to maintaining the line that no one rigged the case for war or risked criminal conduct to push back against a critic who believed it was. But the bottom line is a simple one, regardless of its origins. Is Libby a perjurer or not? He is. And Bush has nullified the sentence. To please a political constituency.  It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law – except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn’t know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served.  And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security.

What more do we need to know? These people think they are above the law. This president thinks he is above the law. The vice-president believes he is above the law. And when democratic leaders act as if they are the law unto themselves, and are prepared to upend the justice system to serve their own political ends, it’s time for a revolt. Sorry, David. But this won’t be forgotten – ever. It’s a final straw, a call to wake up before these criminals get away with it one more time.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)