Month: July 2007

Lots of talk about it, from folks generally outraged by the last 6.5 years of shenanigans in the Administration (which includes, for this purpose, the VP’s office).  My thoughts?

Meh.  From a practical standpoint, the chances of it actually happening between now and January 2009 are passingly small.  Hell, look at Alberto Gonzalez.  For all his buffoonery before Congressional committees, inane answers that made him look like either an idiotic liar or a cretinous half-drunken absentee manager, for all the responses that drove even Republican congresscritters to condemn him and call for his resignation — the Senate couldn’t muster the votes from the GOP to pass a non-binding “No Confidence” vote.

What do you think the chances are, in an election year-and-a-half, that the Republicans will actually treat the actions of the last six years, which encompass activities that they approved of and signed off on or stood by at the time and merely smiled and nodded about, as something worth removing the President (and/or VP) for?

Zilch.  Zero.  Zip.

And given that the majority of Democrats — and the American people — have gone along with it, too, makes it even less likely.

All impeachment proceedings would do at this point is distract from the Administrations actions, now and ongoing.  It would become (or be made) the center stage, the focus, dragging on and on, and the argument would turn from “Was this policy/action by the Administration a sheer affront to what it means to be American” to “Should the President be impeached, or is this impeachment all about partisan politics?”  (And, sadly, given their propensities, there would be enough Democrats trying to exploit it baldly and politically to give the suggestion legs.)

Unless Bush/Cheney actually do something to actively torque off Congress as a whole enough to act  (which they’ve verged on doing at times, to be sure), or can get the President or VP to actually testify on the record and perjure themselves (which is how they nailed Clinton — and why they never have and never will get those two into such a situation), we’ll never see it happen.

(Do I think it should happen?  Yes, ideally.  But pragmatically, I think it holds too many risks, given the current situation and limited time to do it all in, even if it were likely that it could happen.)

So what can and should an outraged public do?

The best result would be to vote the bums out, to have this Administration so widely despised by the voting public that not all the election year shenanigans that the Administration can pull will be able to keep 2009 (and 2011 and 2013) seeing a Democratic president and Congress, akin to the post-Watergate backlash of ’76.  That has its own dangers — I’m a big believer in not having single-party rule — but it would be the clearest, and most straightforward condemnation that could be given to Bush and Cheney and their cronies.

It might not be as satisfying as impeachment and carrying their figurative heads around on pikes, but it would be a lot more likely and a lot more effective at keeping this sort of thing from happening in the future.

The more I keep pondering on the whole Scooter Libby “clemency,” the more it keeps irking.

I have to quote from a Kung Fu Monkey link Marn cited commented in my original post on the subject.

Then Scooter gets his sentence commuted. Oh, and just to make sure we’re clear on where I stand here, let me paraphrase Glenn Greenwald —

“The Libby prosecution clearly was the dirty work of the leftist anti-war movement in this country, just as Cohen describes. After all, the reason Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate this matter was because a left-wing government agency (known as the “Central Intelligence Agency”) filed a criminal referral with the Justice Department, as the MoveOn-sympathizer CIA officials were apparently unhappy about the public unmasking of one of their covert agents.

In response, Bush’s left-wing anti-war Attorney General, John Ashcroft, judged the matter serious enough to recuse himself, leading Bush’s left-wing anti-war Deputy Attorney General, James Comey, to conclude that a Special Prosecutor was needed. In turn, Comey appointed Fitzgerald, the left-wing anti-war Republican Prosecutor and Bush appointee, who secured a conviction of Libby, in response to which left-wing anti-war Bush appointee Judge Reggie Walton imposed Libby’s sentence.”

(The Greenwald article is worth actually reading, btw.)

As KFM notes, it’s unlikely that Libby will suffer any other significant harm.  Even assuming his appeal fails (the likelihood of which is what led a federal appeals court to tell him he had to wait out the process in prison, which is what five hours later prompted the clemency), it’s highly unlikely that Libby will be out a penny of his own money in fines.  Even if disbarred, it’s quite likely he’ll get a nice job in some think tank or university setting.  You don’t go from being the VP’s right hand man to being a bum on the street just because you obstructed justice.  The hue and cry from the Administration and its supporters make it clear that there are plenty of people who think Libby did no wrong.

Which is the key of KFM’s post:

They have found the “exploit” within the United States Government. As I watched Congressmen and Senators stumble and fumble and thrash, unable to bring to heel men and women who were plainly lying to them under oath, unable to eject from public office toadies of a boot-licking expertise unseen since Versailles, it struck me. The sheer, simple elegance of it. The “exploit”.

The exploit is shame.

Our representatives — and to a great degree we as a culture — are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty … dammmnnnn.

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying “You don’t have the balls to take down a government. You don’t have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don’t. What’s beyond that abyss — what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation — terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way.”

Whether they state it that boldly, or simply assert, “It was all for National Security, the Ends justify the Means, and we would do it —  have done it — will do it again, with clean consciences and no reprisals or accountability,”  it’s clear that the Administration does not feel it is accountable to or bound by the law.  The ends really don’t matter — whether you believe the Administration is our last hope against war and terror or believe they are a bunch of pocket-lining thugs — but the grotesque dismissal of any reigning in of the means used in pursuit of those ends is disastrous. 

There is a reason for the law, at least as framed in this country.  It is to protect the weak from the strong, to restrict the use of power for whatever reason.  Because, ultimately, even if the wielders of unrestrained power are saints, that power will be misused.  It will fall into the hands of demons, sooner or later.  Acton’s maxim on absolute power corrupting absolutely doesn’t have to apply to a given individual (though it usually does); it can apply to an institution.  And as sure as God made little green apples, George Bush’s eight-year exercise of power, and dismissal of restraints on it, before or after the fact,  will be used as precedents and justifications by future presidents, Republican or Democrat, for their own “ends.”  And even if you think George Bush is a saint, how long of a string of saints are we likely to see?

It’s not even that the Scooter Libby case is the end of the world per se.  Libby didn’t personally assassinate Valerie Plame, or get caught eating dead puppies stolen from little Iraqi children, or selling nuclear secrets to Iran, or whatever.  Not to dismiss the importance of lying to Congress and trying to cover-up and stall an investigation, but you almost expect that from political operatives. 

No, in this case, it’s not the crime, not even the cover-up, but the casual clemency that sticks in the craw of the body politic, that teaches the lesson to politicians and kids alike that even in the unlikely circumstance that you do get caught out in trying to block an investigation, it won’t matter — you won’t be punished.  Even if a prosecution is successful, and a jury says you’re guilty, you won’t do a day in prison.  The Big Boys will watch out for you.  Next time you get a subpoena from Congress or have to testify in front of a grand jury or get grilled by the Dept. of (“I don’t recall”) Justice — toss back a few mimosas, and don’t sweat it — there’s plenty of clemency and (not yet ruled out) pardons sitting in the file cabinet waiting to have your name filled in.

Disgusting and sad and infuriating all at once.  Because you just know that there’s more of this sort of thing that’s going to happen over the next year and change, and no matter what half-hearted investigations get kicked off after Bush leaves the White House, the legal bases will all be covered, the blanket pardons will have been issued, and there will be no meaningful punishment, just the wailing from the graves of the Founding Fathers, despairing in what’s been done with their nation.