As House Democrats talk of investigating and even censuring President Bush’s commutation of his sentence, Scooter Libby is being compared by Republicans to Marc Rich, the recipient of Bill Clinton’s pardoning largesse.
This debate promises to be more tonic for the state of public morality than the one that would have been followed Bush’s failure to do so.
Imagine the righteous fury of Rush Limbaugh and right-wing bloggers playing Zola to Libby’s Captain Dreyfus with photoshopped images of Cheney’s former chief of staff in prison stripes with numbers on his chest. Compare that to their muttering and bumbling defense of the commutation.
Libby as rescued loser serves the cause of exposing Bush-Cheney lawlessness much better than Libby the martyr would have.
"We're trying to examine the use and misuse of the clemency power and the commutation power," says John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee as Rep. Robert Wexler drafts a resolution to censure Bush for "an unconscionable abuse of authority."
With the coming Senate showdown over subpoenas of White House witnesses in the U.S. Attorneys scandal, this proposed examining and censuring, although it will lead nowhere, is a nice side show to the main attraction.
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