The beauty of being a criminal in a well-organized criminal syndicate is that you know you're protected by the people above you. Sure, they might hang you out there to take a rap or two, but they'll do what they can to make sure you're not too put upon and that you're justly rewarded for your sacrifice to the family.
And so, Scooter Libby avoided jail time when the titular head of the executive branch exercised his Constitutional right to pardon or commute convicted criminals. Every President does it, although generally not in such an obviously partisan and blatantly uncalled for way. Usually a President waits until the end of his term before turning to the business of pardons, and then the pardons are doled out to relatively obscure figures, perhaps tertiary attractions to the main show, but Bush went straight to the payback for Libby sitting there and taking it on the chin for the most corrupt administration since Richard Nixon's.
Speaking of which, the Libby commutation is perhaps even filthier than Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon for "any crimes he may have committed against the United States while President" -- about as broad a whitewashing as you can imagine.
Bonus points for anyone who can identify the origin of my post's title.
7 comments:
Even Paris Hilton couldn't skip out of her jail sentence.
I flunk the title contest ... can't wait to see if someone knows, though.
I don't know the source of the quotation, but I like to think that Chief Wiggum is responsible for this "I fought the law and the law won" revision.
Why does that presidential ability exist? Really, why? And how?
This whole thing is not fair.
Are you referencing the Dead Milkmen or the Dead Kennedys?
It's one of the bands that are dead.
You know what I mean.
ding Ding ding, and MA wins the prize. Sort of. It's the DK's homage to Dan White, the onetime SF Supervisor who shot and killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone and got off on the "twinkie defense".
But it'd be great to reference the Dead Milkmen, too.
Obviously partisan? You do understand, that partisan use is exactly what the Constitution calls for in this situation?
I quote an unlikely source, who defends the President's actions...Alan Dershowitz:
"This was entirely a political case from beginning to end. Libby's actions were political. The decision to appoint a special prosecutor was political. The trial judges' rulings were political. The appellate court judges' decision to deny bail was political. And the president's decision to commute the sentence was political. But only the president acted within his authority by acting politically in commuting the politically motivated sentence."
CF: Alan Dershowitz is hardly an unlikely source in this case, and his assertions that "[everything] was political" isn't exactly a very good supporting argument. I think everyone agrees that the President acted within his authority by granting the commutation -- it's a fairly clear Constitutional right of his (and if he wanted he could pardon every drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and thief in the land), but because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
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