"Baseball... been berry berry good... to me."

"Baseball... been berry berry good... to me." - Garrett Morris as Chico Escuela on SNL, as spoken to "Hane" Curtin

glenn greenwald expresses the same view about the "pardon scooter libby fever" i've been peddling lately (here and here)...

"Beltway crime" is an oxymoron, at least when it is committed by a high-level political official. In exactly the way they treated all prior acts of lawbreaking by Bush officials as innocuous political controversies, the Beltway press speaks of Lewis Libby's felonies as being something other than a "real crime," all so plainly based on the premise that Libby -- as a dignified member in good standing of the elevated and all-important Beltway court -- ought to be exempt from the type of punishment doled out to "real criminals" who commit "real crimes."

[...]

There are many reasons why the political press fails to investigate and uncover real wrongdoing on the part of the government, but a leading reason is that they do not see lawbreaking as genuinely wrong or the lawbreakers as corrupt. These are their friends and colleagues -- their socioeconomic peers and, with increasing and disturbing frequency, their spouses and family members -- and while Important Bush Officials might be "guilty" of engaging in harmless and perfectly accepted political "hardball," they are never genuinely bad people engaged in genuinely bad acts. And they certainly do not belong in criminal courtrooms or prison.

[...]

There is no class of people more defensive of the prerogatives of political power than our "journalist" class, even though, in a healthy and functioning democracy, the exact opposite would be true.

as i've said before, why would those who have worked so hard for their success repudiate the very system that bestowed it on them...?

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