Bush – Page 7 – Hank Kalet

If you can’t do the time,call the president

So a conviction and three appeals later and Scooter Libby is heading to jail.

Check that. Scooter Libby learns that there is no substitute for friends in high places — or, in his case, friends in the highest places.

President Bush said today that he had used his power of clemency to commute the 30-month sentence for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of perjury in March and was due to begin serving his time within weeks.

The action, announced just hours after a federal appeals court denied Mr. Libby’s request to allow him to remain free while his case is on appeal, spares Mr. Libby his prison term, but it does not excuse him from stiff fines or probation.

In a statement issued early this evening announcing his decision, Mr. Bush said he had listened to both critics and defenders of Mr. Libby, who was convicted of four felony counts for lying during a C.I.A. leak investigation.

“I respect the jury’s verdict,” Mr. Bush said. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend 30 months in prison.”

So, to recap. Lie to a grand jury and get a fine. Nice.

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Where is Gore when we need him?

Anyone who still thinks there is no difference between the two parties at the national level need only read this short overview of President George W. Bush’s choice as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Death bed misdirection

How unseemly is this story?

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush‘s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey’s presence in the room, turned and left.

According to testimony yesterday by Comey, the Bush administration was so keen on creating a a paper trail that would make its illegal wiretapping program appear legal that it was willing to take advantage of a deathly ill member of its administration, hoping to catch him in his weakness.

The irony in all this, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, is that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft comes off looking like a paragon of virtue and a defender of civil liberties — a crazy notion given his record in office.

What does this say about Gonzales, the current occupant of the attorney general’s office, and the lengths to which this administration might go to protect its prerogatives and advance its notion of the unitary executive?

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An expert on what doesn’t work

Hey, the president says the Democrats’ plan for funding the Iraq War “won’t work” — and perhaps we should take him seriously. After all, as my colleague John Saccenti points out, if anyone knows what won’t work in Iraq it is President Bush. “He’s an expert in what doesn’t work.”

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Closer to home?

I’d like to believe this will accelerate the return of American troops from Iraq — after all, presidents who lose support from their own party tend to fade ito irrelevency (Nixon resigned when it became clear that Republicans were not going to stand in the way of impeachment). But the this president lives in his own bubble, so no one should expect a change of direction from him.

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