Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Bush should pardon Libby

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…but it might look awfully bad and what with the AP news service rushing out a completely unsupported non-editorial about how this casts a pall over the whitehouse and somehow vindicates Joe Wilson (sorry, I can’t find it anymore on news.google, maybe it got removed) and others jumping on the Wilson-conspiracy bandwagon despite significant evidence to the contrary, I think its time to let bygones be bygones. 

I mean, if this is all about the leak then they got the wrong guy right?  Wasn’t it Richard Armitage?  Swearing and repeating Plame’s name over and over on tape to Novak?  Ooh damn thats invconvenient.  Libby just lied about what he said to whom and when.  Other than that he did nothing illegal.  I always wonder why people do that.

Anyway the left will have a massive conniption if Libby gets pardoned (which might in itself be worth seeing) but I think a great compromise would be as follows:

Bush should issue a double pardon, pardon two people for the same charge at the same time:  Libby pardoned for perjury and obstruction in the leak case, and Bill Clinton pardoned for perjury and obstruction in the Paula Jones & Lewinsky cases.

Makes a point and includes a Democrat to boot!

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Comments

  1. and who’s going to pardon Ann Coulter for being Ann Coulter? And is there any pardoning for Entertainment Tonight for bring us Anna Nicole 24/7? 

  2. Robert Novak, whose column kicked off this whole mess, has just written his own take on the matter:

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    http://www.realclear…

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    Here’s an excerpt:

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    The trial provided no information whatever about Valerie Plame’s status at the CIA at the time I revealed her role in her husband’s mission. No hard evidence was produced that Libby ever was told she was undercover. Fitzgerald had argued that whether or not she was covert was not material to this trial, and Federal District Judge Reggie B. Walton had so ruled. Yet, in his closing arguments, Fitzgerald referred to Mrs. Wilson’s secret status, and in answer to a reporter’s question after the verdict, he said she was “classified.”

    In fact, her being classified — that is, that her work was a government secret — did not in itself meet the standard required for prosecution of the leaker (former Deputy Secretary of State Armitage) under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. That statute limits prosecution to exposers of covert intelligence activities overseas, whose revelation would undermine U.S. intelligence. That is why Fitzgerald did not move against Armitage.

    Some questions asked me in television and radio interviews after the verdict implied that I revealed Armitage’s name to Fitzgerald. Actually, in my first interview with Fitzgerald after he had been named special prosecutor, he indicated he knew Armitage was my leaker. I assumed that was the product of detective work by the FBI. In fact, Armitage had turned himself in to the Justice Department three months before Fitzgerald entered the case, without notifying the White House or releasing me from my requirement of confidentiality.

  3. This one is unfortunately very sarcastic, perhaps inspired by a feeling of powerless befuddlement in the fact of the horribly wrong conventional wisdom?

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    http://www.latimes.c…

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    excerpt:

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    “The golden couple targeted by White House machine,” as described by one British paper this week, have had to put up with so much. There’s no need to dwell on the early hardships faced by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV: that arduous junket to Niger helped along by his wife, Valerie Plame; the endless cups of sweet mint tea he had to drink; the awkwardness that his findings, as privately briefed to the CIA, supported President Bush’s famous “16 words” although he said the exact opposite on the New York Times Op-Ed page and in 12 trillion television studios.

    A man of less mettle might grow frustrated with the effrontery of the Washington Post’s editorial page calling him a liar, a blowhard and the real destroyer of his wife’s career. Simply because it’s true hardly justifies stepping on his story line. Don’t they know he’s the author of a book, “The Politics of Truth,” and a winner of awards for his self-proclaimed courage for “speaking truth to power”? Why should a bipartisan Senate intelligence report cataloging his dishonesty and distortions stand against a man with such important hair?

  4. …Your posts and comments are as vacuoous* as those of Republican operatives that I have seen on other message boards and Weblogs.

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    *vacuoous: stupid, devoid of sensible content, easily shown to be full of lies, etc., etc., etc.

    • hmmm well I guess if you don’t mean that I am discussing the matter of lies that have been told, but rather that my posts themselves are lying, then I should refer you to the authors of my talking points (in this case the linked articles, you’d probably assume – even though I found them afterwards)

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      I suggest you take it up with Novak and the LA Times, and while you’re at it the Washington Post editorial page.

  5. Raj took Simon and quite frankly Paula is boring…

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    yo, yo, yo, I kinda liked it. The begining was a little rough. It seemed a little pitchy in spots but you brought all back with a strong finish.

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    I think you picked the right post for your style. Nice job. Let’s hear it from the dog pound (Peter, Gary…) ruff, ruff, ruff…

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