The Commuter in Chief, By Eugene Robinson
Let’s put this in perspective. Martha Stewart is convicted of conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice, and soon she’s decorating a prison cell. Lil’ Kim is convicted of perjury before a grand jury and conspiracy, and off to the big house she goes. Paris Hilton commits a crime that could be described as “driving while blond, vapid and obnoxious,” and next thing you know she’s freaking out in solitary confinement.
But when Scooter Libby is found guilty of perjury before a grand jury, lying to FBI investigators and obstruction of justice — basically the same crimes that got Stewart and Lil’ Kim locked up, and miles beyond anything Hilton ever did — George W. Bush intervenes to save him from the indignity of spending a single night behind bars. No home confinement, no ankle bracelet, nothing. Now that he’s paid his $250,000 fine, Scooter is free to scoot on with his life. [mjh: Of course, Republican stalwarts paid the money, not Scooty. How much did Fred Thompson donate?]…
The reason Bush gives — that he accepts the verdict against Libby but thinks the sentence was excessive — makes no sense either. The remedy in that case would be to wait until Libby served a non-excessive amount of time in prison and then commute the sentence. …
What does make sense is that the president would feel responsible for Libby’s plight. Libby’s criminal lies were about his part in discrediting claims that the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq was bogus. Bush might have decided that since this is his war, he, not Libby, should be the one held to account.
Then again, Bush might have worried that sitting in prison, with time on his hands, novelist Libby might turn his pen to a nonfiction memoir of his White House years. “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” would have been a good working title.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/05/AR2007070501823.html
– – – – –
Shankar Vedantam – Bush: Naturally, Never Wrong – washingtonpost.com
The different perceptions of victims and perpetrators in [social psychologist Roy] Baumeister’s experiment are a result of a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, [Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson] argue in a new book titled “Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me).”
Aronson said the bias toward self-justification explains the administration’s shifting rationale for the Iraq war and why Bush could not have allowed Libby to go to prison: “If Scooter Libby, working with the blessing of the vice president, lied about what he did in order to protect higher-ups, he is a good guy, he is loyal. It is an exquisite example of self-justification because the good guys are defined as those who are loyal to the cause even if the cause is wrong.”
For Bush to have allowed Libby to go to jail, he would have had to live with the idea that someone who he thought was a good and loyal soldier was being punished for being a good and loyal soldier — a fairly extreme form of cognitive dissonance. The only way to keep such cognitive dissonance at bay, the psychologists said, was for Bush to see Libby’s prison sentence as overly harsh and do away with it altogether, even though Bush, both as president and governor of Texas, has long prided himself on refusing clemency to felons.
“He sees no inconsistency, just as we cannot see our own inconsistencies even though they are strikingly clear to everyone else,” Tavris said. “He is protecting one of his own, but his reasoning is consistent with the way the mind works to preserve consistency.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/08/
– – – – –
Death in Texas, By Sister Helen Prejean – The New York Review of Books
Bush wrote in his autobiography that it was not his job to “replace the verdict of a jury unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair”….
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17670
– – – – –
The Daily Dish
“I don’t believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own,” – George W. Bush on why he signed death warrants for 152 inmates as governor of Texas.
The quote is from his own book, “A Charge To Keep.” I think that’s a debate-ender, isn’t it?”
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/quote-for-the-5.html
– – – – –
ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor
This ‘Family’ Is Above the Law
THERE’S BAD news, good news and great news about President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail time.
The bad news is that in taking care of Scooter, who took the fall for Bush and Dick Cheney, the White House is finally OK with being indistinguishable from a criminal mob.
The good news is for all those “Sopranos” fans who mourned the recent loss of their favorite show; now you can just watch the nightly news on the Bush administration for your crime-family fix.
The great news is that now our children know that any criminal in the land can be above the law, as long as he knows the right people. …
JIM MULLANY
Sandia Park
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/letters/576832opinion07-08-07.htm