This week's issue expressed outrage over the president's commutation of Scooter Libby's jail sentence in the CIA outing case. I wrote them the following reply, some of which duplicates my last blog entry.
I am not convinced that "outrage" is quite the right emotion here. We need to be very careful to cast this in the proper light.
The president is, in fact, perfectly within his rights to commute Libby's sentence, or even pardon him outright. Even we in the opposition party cannot deny that this is one of the privileges granted to the president by the Constitution, and he doesn't have to justify it to anyone. The issue here, it seems to me, is that Bush has chosen once again to try to cast the blame elsewhere. If he had said, for example, "Libby is a good friend and was a faithful servant to this administration, and because of that I don't want him to go to jail," we would have been irritated, but I think we would have been able to respect his honesty. But instead, Bush's announcement tried to spin the facts to justify the commutation. That is where he crossed the line, in my opinion.
It's exactly the same situation as in the Alberto Gonzales case. The Attorney General has the legal power to fire US Attorneys. They serve at his whim. He can fire them for whatever reasons he wants -- legal missteps, ethics violations, bad choice of clothes, wrong hair color. It doesn't matter. If the administration had said "yes, we fired those attorneys because we didn't like their political leanings," again we would have been irritated, but it would have been perfectly legal. Instead, the administration had to spin up a false story to justify the firings, and it is that spin that got Gonzales in trouble.
Oddly enough, this is the same thing that got to Clinton. Regardless of the morals, it is perfectly legal to have an intern provide sexual favors at the workplace, even in the White House. Had Clinton simply been honest, instead of trying to spin things, he would not have been impeached.
Honesty. It's quite a concept. When did it stop being a necessary part of American politics?
