This appeal, asking George to override the justice system, is OUTRAGEOUS in the extreme

this can only be read with an airsickness bag close at hand...

Mr. President, some weeks ago, I wrote a letter of appeal, a character reference, to Judge Reggie B. Walton, urging leniency for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Scooter, I said, has seen the undoing of his world, but he comes before a "just court in a just and decent country." I was joined by men and women of greater acclaim in our public life, but the petitions were in vain. Now the legal process has played out, Judge Walton has issued a harsh prison term of 30 months, and what will rescue this honorable man is the power of pardon that is exclusively yours.

[...]

Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics. You are not a lawyer, Mr. President, nor is the vast populace out there. The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson's identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.

[...]

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could not, and would not, decide whether this was a case about outing an undercover agent, or a plain case of perjury and obstruction of justice. He had the best of possible worlds: He presented this case as one of perjury, insisted that the undercover status of Valerie Plame Wilson was of no consequence, then shifted grounds to introduce the Intelligence Identities Protection Act at a latter phase in the proceedings. The "covertness" of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established. Even Judge Walton himself was not sure of her employment status. So the recollections of Scooter Libby clashed with those of journalist Tim Russert? Surely, we don't end an honorable career in public service and haul a man off to prison on that thinnest of reeds.

that's right... compare a convicted perjurer and obstructor of justice, one who hasn't endured a single privation or hardship in his entire life, one who cravenly decided to take a fall rather than to allow his criminal boss to face accountability, to a soldier fallen in combat, is despicable and intolerable... equally despicable is the complete dismissal of our system of justice, due process, solid evidence, proven fact, and the smear of one of the most thoroughly professional prosecutors i have ever witnessed in action... that this should occupy nearly a full page in a newspaper with a global circulation is totally outrageous... when i read stuff like this, i can only weep for my country and those who claim they are serving it...

(thanks to atrios via firedoglake...)

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