Glory be, this op-ed from the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger is hilarious, in so many uncountable ways!
As the curtain closes on the presidency of George W. Bush, the one loose end dangling is the pardon of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In 2007 Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.
Wow. Once upon a time, you could count on the Wall Street Journal to make note of the collapse of the economy as a more significant "loose end," and not a guy whose sentence the President has already commuted, but whatever! Let's enjoy this flight of fancy!
Let us be clear about the Bush legacy.
Yeeaaokay!
After September 11, not a year into Mr. Bush's term, his became a war presidency. George Bush's place in history will turn on what becomes of Iraq and al Qaeda. If Iraq fails, history will mark down the Bush presidency. If by fits and starts Iraq grows into the Middle East's first large, functioning democratic republic, a more likely result, the Bush presidency will be one of the great building blocks of the new century's political order.
Or? Iraq will remain heavily influenced by Iran, governed in a way that's strange to people familiar with Western democracies, and populated by a citizenry who keep an extra shoe at the ready, in order to fully express their feeling about the Bush Presidency in a style in keeping with Iraq's rich cultural traditions.
In his final press conference Monday, Mr. Bush described the disarray after the airliners slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field: "People were hauled in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, 'How come you didn't know this that or the other?'"
The Bush team righted itself and assembled a tough response to the attack: the assault on the terror strongholds of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act. Then, in astonishingly short order, the political unity of 9/11 dissolved. Mr. Bush and his team found themselves embattled by the opposition party, much of the Beltway press corps and a leaking national-security bureaucracy. The goal of the domestic opposition was to thwart the Bush antiterror policy, or take down the people shaping it.
I'm sorry, Daniel, but didn't you mention Scooter Libby in your first paragraph? Are we ever going to get back to that?
Scooter Libby is the most notable casualty of the domestic war that ran alongside the global war on terror.
Oh, sweet Jesus. You have to be kidding.
In my many years of writing about Washington's politics, I thought that the Plame affair, its long, mad hunt for the leaker, and then the Libby trial, was one of the most fantastic, preposterous events I've ever watched.
But President Bush publicly pledged to uncover the source of that leak! "I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it. And we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing." That "long, mad hunt" was an administration priority!
Nominally the legal case was about the wheels of a prosecution in motion. Indeed by its end the details of the case against Mr. Libby had burned down to a travesty. But make no mistake. The effort that went into keeping the Plame affair alive was about discrediting the war effort in Iraq and the Bush antiterror program.
But make no mistake! The effort that went into discrediting Joseph Wilson was about keeping the flawed rationale for the Iraq War alive!
To the extent the Libby prosecution distracted the White House staff, consumed its working hours, eroded personal savings on lawyers, and inevitably pitted the president's aides against each other, the strategy worked. The domestic opposition didn't deter George Bush. But like any tireless pack, it hurt him and it hurt his goals.
I refer you back to the part where Bush says, "I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it. And we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing." And the investigation becomes a priority endorsed by the White House, why not?
Washington is on thin ice. The American people could not be more disgusted than they are with the tenor and conduct of politics in Washington. The long Libby case was more muck. When the vice president's chief of staff was convicted, financially ruined and professionally destroyed on the basis of a conversation, my first thought was, this is going to make it hard to attract the best people to serve in Washington.
OKAY, DANIEL I'M GOING TO STOP YOU RIGHT THERE. I know, you are going to go on to say that the Washington, DC is a "viper's nest" and that the only way to HEAL the WOUNDS OF AMERICA is to add a Presidential Pardon to a Presidential Commutation. But let me hit you up with a little reality. No one really cares, one way or the other, what happens to Scooter Libby. The United States is involved in two military operations, and no one really cares about those anymore either. What people care about is that they are getting laid off and losing their homes. You may fervently believe that the citizens of this Republic are presently convulsed with concern over what is going to happen to Scooter Libby. You are completely, inexorably, unmistakably, unbelievably wrong about this. The Scooter Libby Cause is shared by a few obsessed op-ed writers, who clearly have the luxury of being free of the country's real vexations.
And that whole worry about whether Washington will continue to attract good citizens who want to serve their country? Allow me to disabuse you of that nonsense.
George Washington, in his farewell address, warned against the destructive force of party rancor. Something like that is at stake here again. Serious people in our politics, Republicans and Democrats, would understand that a Bush pardon of Scooter Libby is mainly about closing some of the worst wounds of these long war years. And about giving the nation a chance at refinding that lost unity.
You realize that this paragraph basically chased away whatever "serious people in our politics" that were still paying attention, right?
These were hard years, and required hard decisions. It's time to let Scooter Libby get back to work. Like the rest of Washington.
Scooter wants a job? Yeah. You tell Scooter to go and get himself "shovel-ready."