Time Ignores Facts About the Libby Case

Commentary Magazine ^ | 7/24/2009 | Jonathan Tobin

[Jbny]

Time magazine devotes a feature of more than 4,700 words to the dispute between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney over the former’s refusal to pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice presidential aide convicted of obstructing an investigation into the leaking of a CIA officer’s identity

[Lakeshark]

A good article. Having followed the Libby case, it is inexplicable that W did not pardon him.

One of the worst examples of prosecutorial misconduct ever, and Bush sided with the wrong people.

[chesley]

Amen. It was dishonorable of W to fail to pardon Libby.

He made a lot of mistakes, but they were mistakes. This was one of his few failures in character.

[Brad from Tennessee]

Victoria Toensing has a good analysis of the hidden motives and unethical conduct of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald who used the Libby trial to settle old scores with Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. These issues had nothing to do with the Plame case.

TRIAL IN ERROR 2-18-07

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021601705_pf.html

[nathanbedford]

The failure to pardon Scooter Libby was not, as Jeffrey Tobin asserts, a dishonorable lapse by the Bush administration. It was not dishonorable but it was a manifestation of the misunderstanding of the proper role of president of the United States as concerns party politics and as it concerns his duty to mount the bully pulpit and defend his own policies. It is not precisely naïveté which confounded George Bush and handcuffed him in the face of his enemies, it was a misguided conception of his responsibilities as president. A misunderstanding of honor.

When George Bush said he would restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office he clearly meant it and he fulfilled that promise as fully as could be expected of any man. But the honor of the presidency is a duty which comes from defending the administration from partisan attack. That also implies that the president will keep faith with his own party which supported and sustained him and funded him and ultimately voted him into office. Without a functioning party led by a savvy and articulate president defending his administration and party principles, governance begins to break down. To a large extent, this is the story of the disintegration of the Bush administration.

Bush's first mistake in the Scooter Libby case was to accept the initial premises of the left. Which conceded the "seriousness" of the leak implicitly confirming that Valerie plane was an important CIA operative. He implicitly conceded that a law had been broken. He implicitly conceded that the national security of the United States had been threatened. He ultimately caved to the growing pressure which we had done nothing to stop with all his concessions, and called for a special prosecutor. He failed to relate this leak of very minor consequence to national security with the drumbeat of leaks to the New York Times said the most serious effects on national security.

Rather than commuting Scooter Libby's sentence he could have pardoned him at no additional political cost. He could have intervened when it was revealed that Armitage was the leaker and issued pardons left and right on the spot. They would have seized the political moment.

All this comes not from a want of honor in the Bush administration but from a want of partisan zeal and from a want of understanding that his job as president is to fight the political fights which are necessary to protect his policies. He failed on both counts.

The Valerie plane and Scooter Libby fiasco and be seen as a metaphor for the whole of the Bush administration.

[Lyantana]

It came from a MISS guided notion of “turning the other cheek as a Christian” the president can turn his cheek all he wants with regards to his personal life but he also swore on the Bible to DEFEND the Constitution and he actually failed to do that by not defending his party and his position.

[dervish]

I started to read the Time article and found I lacked the intestinal fortitude to relive the sickening disinformation.

[The_Sword_of_Groo]

Amen to that. I stopped reading after I read the line “following 8 troubled years of the Bush administration” (or something like that)which was somewhere near the first sentence of the first paragraph

[a fool in paradise]

4,700 words

That has to be much of the issue. Isn't it thinner than a comic book these days?

[nathanbedford]

I have been posting for years that the key to understanding George Bush is to realize that he is not a conservative but a Christian. Here is a post, parts of which go back years, the relevant part about his Christianity dominating his politics goes back nearly a to the time of the Harriet Miers nomination. You are right in your observation and I should have mentioned it. Here is the post which is really a compilation:

In recent weeks, no FReeper has been more harsh, even bitter in his criticism of President Bush. But I have never accused him of low or base motives. I have abandoned George Bush over Harriet Meir, spending, McCain Feingold, and the foolishness and ineptness over Valerie Plame, the ineptness over Katrina, validating Democrats by pandering to the likes of Teddy Kennedy, the need to change course in Iraq, and above all, over immigration, but I never thought that Bush was wrong because he would sell us out or because he was ambitious.

Bush will act, or not act, because he believes it is right and because he is a patriot. Unlike the author, Bush is not a neocon, his agenda is strictly America's future.

If one considers the list of failures for which I indict George Bush in the preceding quoted paragraphs, not one of those actions that so troubled me occurred because George Bush is a small man. To the contrary, they happened because George Bush chose options congruent with his faith. They were animated out of a fullness of heart, not a meanness of character.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HARRIET MEIR

Looking back, I think the nomination of Harriet Mier was a profound disillusionment for me as it was for George Will and other conservatives. I quote a reply in the context of that nomination to demonstrate that I am not personally opposed to George Bush, to the contrary I admire his character: P> [Quoting George Will:] "As for Republicans, any who vote for Meir will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch's invaluable dignity."

As a result of the policies of the Bush administration, Republicans have forfeited their formerly kryptonite hundred year claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility.

Thus we have wantonly kicked away one of the legs of our stool. Another leg of the stool was comprised of our ability to go to the electorate, as George Bush did successfully in the last two elections, and persuasively argue that we were the party of judicial integrity. That we were the party which manned the threshold to the Constitution like the Patriots at Thermopylae to check the ravening horde of liberals who would sack the Constitution.

The Harriet Meir nomination in a stroke has needlessly compromised our ability plausibly to appeal to the electorate as a the party which stands on constitutional principle and eschews judicial opportunism.

Why did we saw off two of our three legs? On the issue of spending some would say it is because Bush was never a conservative. Others would say that it was the war that did it but that would not be the whole truth, at least that would not be the whole explanation. Others would say that it is simply the nature of a politician to buy votes with other people's money and the temptation, even to Republicans, is irresistible.

WHAT THE NOMINATION OF HARRIET MEIR REVEALED OF GEORGE BUSH'S CHARACTER My own view is that our present dilemma is the product of a little bit of each of the above. For years now I've been posting my view the George Bush is not essentially a movement conservative but a committed Christian. Here's what I've been saying recently:

"The truth is straightforward, as usual. Bush is first a committed Christian, then a devoted family man who values personal loyalty to an extreme, and third, a conservative when that philosophy does not conflict with the first two. In this appointment, Bush believes he has satisfied all three legs of the stool. "On the limited evidence available, I do positively believe Bush appointed her because she has been reborn. I mean that quite respectfully. I mean that he is counting on her being a new person. Most of the time it means she will vote conservative. But I honestly do not think Bush appointed her to vote conservative. I think he appointed he to vote in the SPIRIT."

The sad thing for us conservatives is to contemplate just how unnecessary the debacle over Harriet Meir really was. The whole nomination fiasco is almost uniquely unrelated to identifiable political or policy considerations. In the absence of such temporal explanations, I am left with the conclusion that Bush has selected her because she is Christian.

FAITH TRUMPS PARTY If one accepts that Bush's Christian character is the key to understanding the man, it explains both your support of him and his virtues and my support of him and his virtues, but also my disillusionment with him-equally because of his virtues. If George Bush gives billions of our taxpayer dollars away to fight AIDS in Africa it is a noble gesture out of the impulse of a Christian heart. If he toasts Bill Clinton in the White House and by the gesture implicitly tells the world that the entire Republican effort to impeach Clinton was misplaced, he does so out of the Christian duty to love his enemy. If he panders to Teddy Kennedy in the White House, he sees himself not as sleeping with the enemy but as turning the other cheek. If he is "compassionate" in his conservatism, he sees it as the outworking of his Christian duty to give alms. Finally, if he consigns his whole administration to disintegration as he watches his approval numbers descend into the 20s because he declined Karl Rove's advice to defend the administration's Iraq policy and thus wrecks his administration along with his party's chances, he does so because as a Christian he knows he will be called to account for his actions in another venue.

If George Bush and his family think that politics is "smarmy" and that party politics are even more smarmy, it comes from his epiphany with Billy Graham which made him a new man, a man which sees another world, a larger vision. The world of party politics is grimy and transitory and not a worthy place to store up one's treasure. It is as nothing against the overwhelming contemplation of eternity.

[kathsua]

Plame could not possibly have been a covert agent. She worked at CIA headquarters so any foreign agents watching the building to learn who worked there. Her husband admitted he worked for the CIA which would have meant everyone would publicly tied her to American intelligence which means the CIA was not attempting to hide her intelligence connection.

[GrannyK]

Time arrives in the mail and goes directly into the trash. It’s had a “Last Issue” cover for several months now but they can’t seem to stop sending it...Guess they’ll get the message one of these days, but then, who knows?

[Impy]

I’d have fired the US attorney. But that wouldn’t have gone over well. He went after Blago too but I can’t imagine what he was thinking indicting Libby.