Skip to main content

Bush: Disrespecting the law and our American social contract

Quite simply, this is what happened today:

Bush displayed his contempt for the law by throwing over a jury's verdict.

In the face of these facts:

-- A jury of peers found Scooter Libby guilty;
-- A Republican judge issued Libby a sentence within the guidelines range;
-- Three more judges affirmed that sentence;

President Bush decided to toss it all and commute Libby's sentence.

I hope there's more outrage about this than about Paris Hilton's excursion home for cupcakes after a couple days in jail before she returned to complete her sentence.

I hope the American public sees the injustice in Hilton serving more time than a man who lied under oath and made false statements to both a grand jury and FBI agents multiple times.

And I hope the American people realize the commutation of Libby's sentence was likely a crime in itself, further obstructing justice that Libby already obstructed mightily himself; I hope they realize that the criminal launch of the Iraq War lies beneath this obstruction.

(Thanks to looseheadprop in comments at FireDogLake for making this so easy to understand.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Liveblogged: U.S. vs. Libby -- A primer

As FireDogLake's liveblogging of Libby's trial continues, I note a number of abbreviations, acronyms, slang, shorthand popping up on the fly that most of us Plame-maniacs already know but newbies may not grasp. I'm going to try to document them here, a kind of not-so-secret decoder ring. If there's something you'd like to see added, leave me a comment and I'll cover it here. NOTE: in the event of a server crash at FireDogLake.com, check Windcatpond for announcements, as well as DailyKos for alternative live blogging posts. Complete list of FireDogLake's Libby trial live blog and related posts her e. Acronyms and Abbreviations: "ADD" From notes introduced during testimony by David Addington; abbreviation referred to Addington himself. ADDOPS ? -- Believe to be “Asst. Deputy Director Operations”-CIA (if you can confirm this one, leave me a comment, tks!) CIPA ...

The quality of mercy

The long goodbye has been longer than we ever thought it would be; instead of days or weeks, it's now been over a year since my mother-in-law was admitted to a nursing home. In hindsight it was naive to think that the suffering would be so short in duration. It was also not apparent at the time that the nursing home into which she'd first been admitted was integral to the condition she was in when I first wrote about her long goodbye .

A passing thought

It's been awfully quiet here in this new blog. I miss my Salon peeps stopping by whenever I posted in my old blog. Had a passing thought, though, while contemplating this new-found quietude: maybe the trolls won't find me here. [Sigh] There are tradeoffs for everything.