Get out of jail free
(c) 2007 by David DeKok
The protester above, and several others off camera, were in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., on Tuesday not long after news broke about George W. Bush's pardon, er, commutation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison time for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the White House's leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to retaliate against her husband, Joseph Wilso . Ithaca is that kind of place, a city of aging hippies from the 1960s and political liberals and radicals of every stripe. Gotta love it.
While what Bush did is being spun by the White House and Republicans as "only" a commutation of Libby's prison term, anyone with half a brain can figure out the rest of the story. Libby won't pay a dime of the $250,000 fine. The Daily Kos, which calls it "pardon on the installment plan," reports that rightwing conservatives have already donated $5 million to the Libby Defense Fund. The full pardon, erasing the felonies from Libby's record, will come the day Bush leaves office. Meanwhile, any pressure on Libby to provide information on Dick Cheney's role in Plamegate is gone.
Liberals of a certain age will recall the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" on Oct. 20, 1973, in which President Richard M. Nixon, with the flames of Watergate licking at his feet, set in motion the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Cox had insisted that Nixon turn over certain of the Watergate tapes. Nixon refused, and tried to broker a compromise in which the tapes would be heard only by aging Democratic Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi, who was still recovering from near-fatal gunshot wounds in a mugging and was hard of hearing to boot. Cox rejected the compromise and demanded the tapes. The next day, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliott Richardson and then Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. They refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork (yes, THAT Robert Bork) to fire Cox, and he happily complied. Thank God he was kept off the Supreme Court. The uproar turned many moderate and even conservative Republicans against Nixon, although he would hang on until the following August, when he resigned in disgrace.
It is a sign of how jaded the nation has become that the Libby pardon so far hasn't caused Republicans to run for the door. Mitt "Flip-flop" Romney even called it the "right thing to do." Romney knows he needs the far right vote to have any chance of getting the nomination.
I used to think a Bush impeachment was unlikely or even unwise, since it would give us Cheney as president. But things have changed so much that I don't completely rule out an attempt to impeach both of them.