E.J. Dionne on Libby: "Getting mad and staying mad"

he makes all the same points that have been made since bush's outrageous decision to commute libby's sentence and draws some of the same conclusions...

[I]s it possible to avoid concluding that this was a one-time-only action rooted not in law but in politics and favoritism for an aide who loyally misled the prosecution in a case that implicated top figures of Bush's own administration?

uh... < scratches chin > no...

As Michael Abramowitz reported in Tuesday's Post: "For the first time in his presidency, Bush commuted a sentence without running requests through lawyers at the Justice Department, White House officials said. He also did not ask the chief prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for his input, as routinely happens in cases routed through the Justice Department's pardon attorney." Again: This was a one-time-only ticket for one guy.

[...]

[B]y keeping Libby free, Bush can conveniently postpone a full pardon until after the 2008 election. In the meantime, Libby has no incentive to tell prosecutors anything new about what happened in this case. As liberal blogs have noted [e.g. Daily Kos, here], since he was not pardoned outright, he can use the pending appeal of his conviction to avoid testifying before Congress.

not being one to peruse conservative blogs, dionne points out something that i find a trifle surprising, if not a wee bit encouraging...

"I'm not convinced that the administration should have intervened at all," [Ed Morrissey, a staunch conservative who runs the influential Captain's Quarters blog], wrote. "The sentence fit within the sentencing guidelines championed by Republicans for years as a bulwark against soft-on-crime federal judges, even if it was on the long end of the guidelines by some interpretations. The underlying crimes go to the heart of the rule of law, and those who commit perjury and obstruction should go to prison."

dionne concludes by asking the same question i've been asking just about every other day as some new bush administration outrage is uncovered...

This commutation is an ... outrage because it involves the administration taking steps to slip accountability for its own actions. Are we just going to let this one go by?

well...? are we...?

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Our constitutional crisis - nobody wants to call a spade a spade

e.j. dionne offers this perspective...

So when Democratic presidential candidates get together, they argue about who has the best health-care plan. When Republicans have a big discussion, it's about torture and who'll use it when.

[...]

Our two political parties and their candidates are living in parallel universes. It's as if the candidates were running for president in two separate countries.

and herein lies the REAL problem...

The Democratic mind is focused on serious domestic problems, the Republican mind on terrorism and national security.

first of all, dionne totally omits any mention of iraq, arguably the priority issue in the public mind today... even worse, he fails to point out that nobody, NOBODY is stepping forward to call attention to the REAL issue, the one that subsumes all the others, namely our constitutional crisis... meanwhile, as the clock ticks slowly toward 20 january 2009, the gutting of that precious document continues unabated...

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