Scooter Libby
Thursday June 14, 2007
I honestly don't understand why so many conservatives think Scooter Libby is the victim of a great injustice. Whether or not the Plame investigation was justified or not, the indisputable fact is that the man lied under oath. You don't...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
Rod,
You are right. But it's always a chicken and egg thing in politics. Whether it's voluntary term limits, restrictions on earmarks, or looking the other way on various infractions. It's this sort of stuff that reinforces the "Pox on both your houses" attitude that people have about the political parties in general.
The conservative apologists for creeps like Delay (remember the fat and happy pix of him from St. Andrews in Scotland courtesy of Jack Abramoff?) are really disturbing. You'd think someone would finally stand up and say enough. (Well Tom Coburn has, so he is labeled a crank for not going along enough to get along.)
30 months for lying seems OTT to me. Maybe all us who have lied in a situation of no consequence should do 30 months hard time. Does that sound fair?
Heck, the lady in Tennessee who blew away her minister husband is only getting seven months. And George Soros and his investment cronies aren't going to do any time for siphoning a billion dollars off the Medicaid program with their WellCare investment. The tax payers thought that money was going to pay for health care for the unfortunate, but George knows there's big money to be made in Medicaid.
Fairness seems like an abstract concept to me. It's certainly not reflected in reality.
Scooter was not protecting himself when he made a false statement to the investigation. He was not the person who outed Valerie Plame, Richard Armitage was. It's at least possible he could have misremembered the sequence of events.
Bill Clinton was lying to protect himself. He was being sued for a matter involving sexual conduct and he lied about his own sexual conduct. It's simply not possible that he could have forgotten about his sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewisnsky.
People on the conservative side of things say things like:
Of course, those of the liberal persuasion insist it was an intentional lie, and contradict pretty much every point that the conservatives make.
Rod, do you know of a place that has a dispassionate summary of what really happened?
As someone who's run and had clients testify before grand juries, the phrase is "I DON'T RECALL".You cannot be indicted for a faulty memory. The Junior Senator from the Empire State is quite fond of it, having used it some 46 times in her last grand jury appearance.
This is so unnecessary. Libby got awful advice.
Perjury is perjury, Scott, and it's just wrong, semper et ubique. It doesn't matter whom he was trying to protect. It doesn't matter that the investigation in which he lied should have been discontinued (or that the deposition in which Clinton lied should never have taken place.) It doesn't matter that he's a good guy 99% of the time. It doesn't matter that others, worse than he, are escaping their deserts. It doesn't matter that he's a friend of Bill Kristol or Jody Bottum. Regardless of the occasion, regardless of who does it or what the motive is, lying under oath is never okay. Numquam. Nunca. Jamais. Nikogda. Not in a box, not with a fox. Not here or there, not anywhere. So said a conservative Republican prosecutor, so said a jury, so said a Bush-appointed federal judge and (anticlimax alert) so say I.
Rod, et al.
The explanation is easy and obvious:
IOKIYAR
[for explanation: see http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Kossary#Common_Political_Acronyms_and_Abbreviations]
As Scott mentioned, being guilty of perjury doesn't mean he lied. It is completely realistic that he simply said the wrong thing, or remembered things incorrectly. But the real problem is the sentencing. And in this case, it matters greatly whether or not the investigation should have taken place. It isn't possible for someone to be convicted of leaking Plame's name. So there was no crime committed before the investigation started. To think that he intentionally lied to cover up a non-existent crime stretches the imagination. In our justice system, motives matter a great deal, unlike what our nameless friend might say. It's the difference between first and second degree murder. It's why you don't get a the death penalty for vehicular homicide. An error in judgement is not punished as severely as intentionally breaking the law.
Everybody who keeps talking about the possibility that he may have just misremembered is off base I think. Didn't a jury of his peers consider the evidence and find beyond a reasonable doubt that he was not mistaken, but that he deliberately lied?
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.