LIBBY'S OFF THE HOOK

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby will not be going to federal prison. As Claude Rains said in the classic 1942 film, Casablanca, "I'm shocked. Shocked"!

That the man would never see a single day in the slammer has been pretty much a foregone conclusion since the day he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice late last winter. The Bush Mob has always seen itself as above the law and not subject to the same rules that you and I are forced to play by. But now their arrogance is coming back to haunt them - with a vengeance. This White House is, at this very moment, in the process of crumbling like a house of marked cards. If the summer of 2007 is remembered for anything, it will be the utter destruction of the Bush administration. Yippee!
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There is another reason - a very big reason - why Dick Cheney's former chief of staff won't be heading to the Big House: He knows where ALL of the bodies are buried! As politically explosive as the presidential commutation is, it belies the fact that Bush has dodged a particularly nasty bullet: Scooter Libby (for the time being, anyway) won't be talking. How convenient.
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From the First Fool's written statement:
"I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison".

How touching. Remember that this is the same George W. Bush who, as governor of Texas, refused to even consider the commutation of the sentences of even one of the one-hundred and fifty-two death row inmates who died under his watch - some of them whose guilt was questionable, and a number of whom were severely retarded. The 2000 presidential campaign was on the horizon and he just had to prove to the neanderthals who tend to vote in Republican primaries that he was "tough on crime". In a 1999 interview with Tucker Carlson, Bush mocked the recently executed Karla Faye Tucker. Quivering his lower lip he mimicked the poor woman, "Please don't kill me, Mr. Bush". Carlson, as he later noted, was appalled by the performance. Who wouldn't be?

And keep this in mind: of the slightly over one-thousand human beings who have been murdered by the state since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty thirty years ago, almost fifteen percent of those executions occurred in the state of Texas during the eight year period that George W. Bush served as governor. There's "compassionate conservatism" for ya!

Another no-brainer in this whole disgusting affair is the fact that Libby was covering up the misdeeds of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. It all began with the State of the Union speech that the village idiot of Crawford, Texas delivered to the American people in January of 2003. Those famous sixteen words should someday be etched into the marble of the future Operation Iraqi "Freedom" Memorial Wall:

" The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa".

It was a lie. Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction Program (such as it might have been at one time) was kaput and the administration knew it. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had been sent on a mission to Niger by Cheney's office to try and find out what (if anything) Saddam had tried to acquire. When he came back with a report that stated, unequivocally, that the reports had been bogus (citing alleged documents with the signatures of Nigerian officials who had been out of office for over a decade) he was ignored. They were determined - come what may - to seize what is generally regarded to be the second or third largest oil reserves on the planet consequences be damned.

Six months after Bush's infamous sixteen words, and four months following the stupidest foreign policy blunder in American history (the invasion of - like it or not - the sovereign nation of Iraq), Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times called, "What I Didn't Find in Niger", which exposed the administration's Iraq policy for what it was: a scam. So what did Cheney, Rove, Libby and company do? They did what all real men do when confronted with so intimidating a foe. They went after the guy's wife. Why on earth they believed that it would help their cause to expose the identity of covert CIA agent, Valerie Plaime Wilson, may forever remain a mystery of the ages. Was there some kind of strategic advantage to be gained by outting Ms. Wilson that most of us just aren't perceptive enough to see? Or might it be something as simple as the nagging suspicion that I have harbored from the outset: that these people are dumber than dog shit.

Just a friendly reminder: As of this morning the total number of dead American soldiers in the Neo-Conflict (my name for this stupid fucking war) is at 3,586. The number of dead Iraqi men, women and little children? At least half a million.

Undoubtedly Scooter Libby will eventually be given a full, complete and unconditional pardon by Bush. As the clock ticks away during the final hours of this disgusting administration, the man that so huge a segment of the American people were foolish enough to send to the White House will be pardoning every criminal in his employ. Every criminal - that is - with the exception of George W. Bush! A president, you see, is legally unable to pardon himself. I wonder if Alberto Gonzalez has even bothered to explain this to him yet?

Pray for peace.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
(845) 294-5714
tomdegan@frontiernet.net
Special thanks to Kurt Hornick of Poughkeepsie, NY for the "Get Out of Jail Free" card.