So, the vice president (Mr. Cheney, not Mr. Logorrhea) waged and lost a just war with an increasingly irritated and ultimately implacable George Bush (and God-knows-how-many-other forces of pusillanimity who were whispering in the president’s ear) over a pardon for Scooter Libby. It was a noble cause. Those of us who’d taken sometimes embarrassed note of the much-vaunted Bush loyalty (Miers, Hughes, Gonzales), and who’d watched with pride the commander-in-chief tearing up on visits to his wounded soldiers and the parents of those lost on the battlefield had every reason to believe he’d do right by this loyal soldier. To learn that not even the righteous arguments of his second-in-command could persuade him is sickening. Did the president think Scooter was actually guilty of something other than going out to do battle on his behalf and getting vanquished by St. Tim of Russert and his evil press fairies? And if he did think so? So what? One hundred-fifty-odd guilty embezzlers, drug dealers, money launderers, arms dealers, counterfeiters, tax evaders, committers of mail fraud, thieves, bank robbers, bomb-throwers, and arsonists managed to earn the Bush pardon over the course of eight years. And the dirty dozen convicts whose sentences he commuted? Every one–with the exception of Scooter and, oh yeah, the Sacco and Vanzetti of the conservative media, those two border patrollers nabbed for shooting an unarmed illegal alien who turned out to be a marijuana dealer though they didn’t know that at the time they were lodging a bullet in his ass as he fled–every one was a cocaine dealer, a heroin dealer, a marijuana dealer, a PCP dealer, a crack dealer. To leave a man who has served you and his country faithfully in the company of these vicious criminals is unpardonable.
