Bush Commutes Libby (And Hopes Someone Will Do the Same for Him)

Well, so much for "Rule of Law."

Scooter Libby deserves prison. He is no scapegoat.

Though it's clear that Libby didn't act alone with the Plame leak and in thwarting its investigation, he is no innocent who made the mistake of following orders rather than listening to his better nature.

Those "years of excellent public service" were spent plotting and acting on undemocratic, world-domineering policies.

Is there no one is Washington with any historical perspective?

I. Scooter Libby has always been at the forefront of aggressive neoconservative policy.

In 1992, Libby, along with former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote a “Defense Planning Guidance” report, commissioned by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

This DPG called for the U.S. to claim its authority as the world superpower, to intimidate rivals for power, to bypass the United Nations as needed, to build more weapons to ensure global military dominance, and to strike pre-emptively against those who threaten U.S. interests anywhere in the world.

It was shockingly unethical, bullying and began the end of Americans-as-good-guys. It was supposedly shelved after its embarrassingly heartless approach to the world was leaked.

But in 1997 it resurfaced, only slightly edited, as the Statement of Principles of the Project for a New American Century, signed by Libby, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad and more.

Though PNAC officially closed in 2006, its personnel and policies are still at work, though less visible, through such organizations as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Weekly Standard and, yes, throughout the Bush/Cheney White House and Cabinet agencies.

P.S. From David Corn's response: "The foundation of a democratic judicial system is that the sentence fits the crime. In this instance, the commutation fits the administration."