Libby skates

Holy crap. Bush is going to let Libby skate. Rather than let the taxpayers foot the bill for a lot of expensive legal work, Bush could’ve at least just pardoned Libby right up front. I know, I know. He was hoping for a less politically embarrassing way to let Cheney’s right hand man off the hook for stonewalling the special investigation into the Plame matter.

Libby’s supporters argued that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was over-zealous in prosecuting Libby for lying to investigators when no one was charged over the actual leak of Plame’s status as a Central Intelligence Agency official.

That was sort of the point of making obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators a crime. If folks aren’t going to tell the truth, investigators can’t uncover criminal acts. There are legitimate reasons to question whether criminalizing these sorts of acts are legitimate under the Fourth and Fifth Amendment scheme set up by our Founders. But, the likes of Bush, Cheney, and Libby are among the last of those who can complain without hypocrisy about the loss of civil liberties that favor criminal suspects.

So, to recap, Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Richard Bruce Cheney, was convicted by a jury of his peers for breaking a law duly passed by the United States Congress. George W. Bush in his infinite wisdom has commuted Libby’s sentence before he has served a day in jail. The pro-war administration mouthpiece from the New York Times, Judith Miller, will have spent more time in jail covering for Libby than Libby spends.

And, it’s not as if Bush has been overly generous with pardons for people who weren’t breaking the law on his behalf:

Bush has granted fewer pardons — 113 — than any president in the past 100 years, while denying more than 1,000 requests, said Margaret Colgate Love, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997.

In addition, Bush has denied more than 4,000 commutation requests, and hundreds of requests for pardons and commutations are still pending, Love said.

You’ll remember that Bush, as Governor of Texas, was Captain Death Penalty. When he was Governor, he had this to say with respect to the 152 death sentences he oversaw:

I don’t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.

Of Libby’s 2 1/2 year sentence, President Bush said, “the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.”

Message: If you do the bidding of the Bush administration, you’re above the law and untouchable.

I think John Edwards put it fairly well:

Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world. In George Bush’s America, it is apparently okay to misuse intelligence for political gain, mislead prosecutors and lie to the FBI. George Bush and his cronies think they are above the law and the rest of us live with the consequences. The cause of equal justice in America took a serious blow today.

Bush just did the Democratic candidates a huge favor; he might as well have put the ball on a tee for them. The Republican candidates will have a tough time reconciling this with a message of law, order, justice, and personal responsibility.