Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
"Scooter" is a pretty good name for a prison bitch. But why do I doubt he'll be doing any hard time?
One of my favorite wingnut talking-points is that there's no underlying crime in this case. Oh, you mean like in Bill Clinton's "perjured" Paula Jones deposition? "Erm. . . no, THAT was a serious crime, much more grave than smearing a whistleblowing ambassador by knifing the CIA cover of his wife while she was heading up the search for WMDs in the Middle East. This is just a 'policy disagreement' between the VP and the CIA." OK then, that settles that.
If you listen to Fitzgerald, it's pretty clear that he decided that there was, in fact, an underlying crime. But it was less the individual leaking than it was the orchestration of the leaks. Rather than focusing on Libby, Rove, Armitage, etc., the prosecutor recognized that Dick Cheney was the man behing the entire scheme, but he didn't think he could actually convict him without Libby's testimony. The jury obviously wanted such charges; their spokesman said as much and expressed some disappointment that all they got was a "fall guy." So Fitz is holding out the possibility of a sentencing deal if Libby flips. I won't hold my breath. Libby is waiting on a pardon, and he's almost guaranteed to get one. After which, he'll go on to be a right-wing martyr, turning treason into fat green on the fascist lecture circuit alongside Chuck Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, and Ann Coulter. The "Rule of Law" All-Stars.
If, miraculously, word of these proceedings has reached Jose Padilla in his sensory-deprivation dungeon, he should consider a new legal strategy. Register as a Republican.
posted by tenaciousmcd @ 10:05 AM
13 Comments:
Yes, the conviction is nice to see. I don't care if Libby ever does a day of jail time, though.
The value of the trial was the light it shed on the lies the administration told to gin up this war, the smears it used against truth-tellers who attempted to expose the lies, and the cozy, backscratching, nonadversarial relationship between the administration and the establishment press. The trial dramatized all these things. It kept these truths from being totally buried by all those with a vested interest in suppressing them.
Libby doesn't matter: he was just a functionary, a cog in the machine. And the war rages on, in any case.
I agree with Frances that it doesn't matter if Libby actually does 18 or 27 months in a minimum-security prison. The conviction is the key fact, politically. Unless Bush pardons Libby, that is.
I actually want Bush to pardon Libby. Because the irony of Bush pardoning the man who was Marc Rich's lawyer is rich. And because there's nothing that makes this case more politically damaging to the GOP than a pardon. And I agree with the WSJ and NRO--pardon him today! Keep this story in the news, please please please. After the pardon, then Scooter could be appointed a U.S. attorney. That would be perfect.
Elsewhere on the blogosphere I see libs angry with the female Libby jury on Hardball last night--she expressed sympathy with Libby and hoped that Bush would pardon him. But why anger with this woman? I found her quite appealing. And shouldn't we want jurors, in general, to have sympathy for those in the dock?
Scooter needs to do some jail time. If you've already reconciled yourself to the idea that he shouldn't be punished, then how exactly are you going to muster any outrage for the bullshit pardon that is coming?
Scooter enthusiastically participated in the dishonest trashing of a whistleblower and his wife, who just happened to be an undercover CIA operative working on WMDs. He then lied about it repeatedly under oath. He's no innocent. He's like a little drug dealer who gets caught by the police while the drug lord (Cheney) walks free. Do you just get a walk just b/c you weren't the BIGGEST crook in a criminal gang? No way.
As for Ann Reddington (Juror #10), I found her marginally sympathetic until she made that pardon comment. What a flake. "He seemed so nice. They told a story about him in a cowboy hat. I like rodeos! Yeay!" So this is our standard? "Nice" people who go to rodeos shouldn't go to jail? Take your job seriously, bitch! She said Libby seemed like "a ton of fun." You know, the kind of criminal defendant you'd like to have a beer with. This woman is a lawyer? Rule of law is in some serious shit in this country if this is where our lawyers have sunk. Where's your sympathy for the people who have actually been wronged in this case? It boggles the mind that you would defend this juror.
I'll give the GOP this: they've already won this debate. By focusing on the pardon question, they've short-circuited the real issue: Should Cheney resign? Answer? Yes. But no Dem candidates will call for it b/c they don't want to take the chance that elevating someone else to VP might raise their stature.
Oh, TMcD, don't be so hard on the woman juror. Remember Libby wasn't on trial for leaking Plame's name and ruining her career. He was on trial for lying to the government. No one was personally hurt by these lies. The justice system is undermined and short-circuited by lies to investigators, but nobody is personally wronged. Given the lack of a personal victim, it was hard for a jury focused on the lying charges to see Libby as a villain. Moreover, it was very easy for a jury of hyper-educated Washington bureaucrats, lawyers, and writers to sympathize with a meritocratic overachiever like Scooter Libby. I can't blame them for feeling that way. And, besides, it's good that the jury had no personal animus against the defendant.
I can't get particularly excited about a campaign for Cheney to resign. And it's not because I'd be worried about elevating someone else (though that is a good point). It's because Cheney, to my mind, is no worse than Bush. Bush has been a lawbreaker himself -- in the warrantless wiretapping matter, at the very least. The man deserves to be impeached, no question about it. And so does Cheney. But politically this isn't possible and should not be attempted. It would hurt Democrats looking forward to 2008.
Call me a pragmatist, but 2008 matters to me far more than justice for Bush and Cheney. Justice will never be achieved. The American people had their chance to get rid of these lying warmongers. But they were delusional and stupid enough to reelect them. And we all have to pay the price.
Frances, this is truly a dark day. You've actually become a beltway insider, like those soulless bastards at the WaPost (and elsewhere in the MSM) who chalk up ruthless GOP illegality to everybody-does-it "hardball": hey, it's all in fun!
Scooter may only have been convicted of perjury and obstruction, but we all know his real crimes were much greater. Rather than sympathizing with the striver in the cowboy hat, we ought to scorn the man who devoted his career to the lackey service of evil men. He was smart enough to know better, but he made his own choices and he's got nobody to blame except himself. I hope that s.o.b. rots in hell. Too bad I don't really believe in hell.
I also disagree with your point about 2008. It's not enough just to beat these guys. They must be broken and humiliated. "Bushism" must come to be seen as a disaster of such monumental proportions that it can never be repeated. You're right to suggest that Bush-Cheney are not themselves the ultimate problem. The problem is the movement, which is no longer "conservative" in the standard meaning of the term, but is now a` quasi-fascist cult run by extremists and demagogues. That won't change unless the criminals running the show pay some real price. Scooter is a nice down payment. But if he walks free & becomes a right-wing celeb, that sets a really bad precedent.
I gotta say I side with the Tenacious One on this. A lot of hurt was done to Plame personally, to the CIA and to our country by her outing -- and Libby allowed himself to become Cheney's point man on this operation. Again, Fitzgerald couldn't prosecute the so-called real crime, because Libby and the others were all lying about it and obstructing justice.
I have no sympathy for Scooter -- he deserves more than hard time. Don't forget in 1997 he signed his name to the Neoconservative Manifesto over at the PNAC site, which, lest we forget, argued that in time of peace after the Cold War we needed to increase defense spending, not only to line the pockets of Dick Cheney's friends, but also "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests" (i.e. pre-emption and regime change) and thus lead the world to a "New American Century" (otherwise known as blatant empire).
Thus when 9/11 came along he was integrally involved in cooking the books on WMDs to justify those policy goals in Iraq (i.e. he is somewhat responsible for the miasma in Iraq), and when Joe Wilson called him and his boss on the carpet for these misleading claims, he and his boss set about destroying Wilson, and his wife was fair game. Even mafia types generally have the decency to leave other family members out of a hit job. What kind of a man must he be to partake in that?
Scooter may not have been the center of the rotton onion, but when you peel that onion back he was as close to the rotten center as it gets and he did the bidding of the rotten onion head. For all those reasons he deserves hard time. To many Iraqis undoubtedly he deserves the senatus consultum ultimum.
Hey guys, don't get out the big guns, calling me a beltway insider. Talk about going nuclear!
I completely agree with you about the whole White House warmongering, destroy-the-truth-tellers enterprise, and Libby was certainly up to his neck in it. I hate all these people for what they have done to the country.
But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the jury. They were specifically not supposed to talk about, read about, or focus on the bigger picture or even the underlying crime. This mades it much easier for THEM to sympathize with Libby.
I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I personally sympathize with Libby! I am sure that I detest what he did just as much as you guys.
The point I'm trying to make is that the story is so much bigger than Libby. Even if he served the rest of his life in jail, there will never be justice for what this administration has done. No point focusing overmuch on him.
The trial helped educate the public about the larger issues that matter. It contributed mightily to the discrediting of the movement, a goal I fully share with TMcD. But now that the trial is over, Libby isn't of any great use anymore.
I think that the point Frances and I made is that whether Scooter goes to prison is largely irrelevant, from a political point of view. For Paul and the Tenacious One, however, this is visceral and personal. Scooter deserves to be punished.
I don't disagree, but that's not really for me to decide (maybe it's God's decision?). Strangely enough in our system, it's not really up to the jury, either--their verdict justifies punishment, but juries are often instructed not to consider the sentencing consequences of their factual findings. So there's nothing strange about a juror being uncomfortable with that aspect of their "job." The system actually takes that into account by separating jurors from sentencing (in all but capital cases). Now, you might disagree with that, but that's how it is.
Finally, this doesn't really apply to Scooter per se, but we incarcerate way too many people in this country. So pardon me if I don't beat the drum for harsher sentences than those warranted by our already overly punitive system.
There's no way Frances is a beltway insider. She doesn't even go to cocktail parties.
I think the two comments that I still can't reconcile are:
1. Politically it doesn't matter if Libby does jail time, or put another way "Libby doesn't matter."
2. No one was hurt by his lying to the government
I can see where the jury would have sympathy for the guy, based on viewing the case strictly from the jury box (or rather the boxed-in jury). But of course that sympathetic portraiture they saw in the court room was for the most part a fiction created by the defense team to raise sympathy. The defense, after all was the one who raised the issue of him being a fall guy, and then they didn't follow up on it. There are only three reasons they did this:
1. He really was set up, but they couldn't support the charge
2. He really wasn't set up and they made this up to get sympathy.
3. He really was set up & they could have given more evidence to support this narrative, but Scooter knows he'll get a pardon anyway if he plays the game and keeps his mouth shut.
I don't believe #1. If either of the other 2 are true, then Scooter is really no sympathetic character.
At any rate, taking a wider view outside the jury box, he deserves hard time. This hard time would not merely be "symbolic". It would actually create a real hardship on Libby and his family, which he deserves.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Paul, very well said.
Let me address another point made by Frances and #3: the idea that Libby's fate "doesn't matter." This is really, really wrong. Two reasons: first, justice matters. It is not a matter of irrelevance whether our system actually metes out appropriate punishment for criminal behavior. Scooter is no poster boy for prison overcrowding problems. He's one guy, and his prosecution, unlike say the war on drugs, is not a strain on the prison system. Sheesh!
Second, Libby serving time does matter from a consequentialist political standpoint, not just as retributive justice. One of the reasons GOP administrations break the law with such callous glee is that they have no fear of actual punishment. And they know that they'll almost always be able to spin lawbreaking down the road to the morons in the MSM. One of the main reasons that Iran-Contra has not stained Reagan's legacy much, at least not compared to say Watergate, is that there wasn't much jail time there. Bush Sr.'s Xmas eve pardons wiped much of that clean, to the point where wingnuts act as if there was simply no criminal activity there at all. Libby doing time brings home the gravity of this case.
I wish I believed that Libby doing time would get wingnuts to think that a crime was really committed here. But, unfortunately, it's not just the wingnuts who believe that the Libby outcome is a travesty. IT'S ALSO THE MAINSTREAM PRESS. Read the Washington Post's editorial on the verdict. Not even they accept the legitimacy of the case.
I can't get excited about Libby's time because 1-3 years in a minimum security prison is still such a gross injustice, considering the awful suffering that has been unleashed by the warmongers Libby served so diligently. I just can't get interested in him and his fate. He deserves whatever he gets, but justice will never be had. The real underlying crime was lying to the American people in order to start a war. And no one will ever do any time for that.
P.S. Paul, when I said "no one was personally hurt by Libby's lies," I was looking from the jury's perspective. Lying to the government doesn't create a victim the way that mugging someone does. I meant the point in a purely analytical sense. Fitzgerald couldn't put the victim of Libby's crimes on the stand, because there wasn't one -- not in terms of the case he was bringing.
Madness! Madness! Madness!
OK, I'm just kidding.
But to quote the Fitz here:
If as a result his wife had a job, she worked at CPD, She gets dragged into newspapers. People want to find out was a law broken when people want to know, who did it. What role did Defendant play. What role did VP play? He told you he may have discussed this with VP. Don't you think FBI desesrves straight answers. When you go in [that] jury room, your commonsense will tell you that he made a gamble. He threw sand in the eyes of the FBI. He stole the truth of the judicial system. You return [a guilty verdict] you give truth back.
So, yes, I think there was a victim. The judicial system, which is run by real people.
At any rate, next week when Plame goes before the Congress I think we'll finally put a face on a real victim and even the Washington Post won't be able ignore her, although undoubtedly Charles K will figure out a way to vilify her like he did Fitz this morning. We can't worry about persuading the hardcore 35% of rightwing-nuts. We can make a difference with the middle 30% of "undecideds".
Post a Comment
<< Home