Libby sentence commuted

Ah, more of that famous George W. Bush mercy toward criminals...:

Bush has granted fewer pardons -- 113 -- than any president in the past 100 years, while denying more than 1,000 requests, said Margaret Colgate Love, the Justice Department's pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997.

In addition, Bush has denied more than 4,000 commutation requests, and hundreds of requests for pardons and commutations are still pending, Love said.

But remember, it was only his prison sentence that got axed. So let that be a lesson to all of you potential criminals out there, if you try to lie to a grand jury and obstruct a federal investigation, you might end up having to, uh, pay a fine.

Meanwhile, Scoot's friends are pushing for Fitzgerald to be subject to charges of prosecutorial misconduct for, I guess, punishing the wrong kind of people. Wouldn't that be peachy, if all this mess ended with Scooty getting off scoot-free and Patrick Fitzgerald's career being destroyed?

Speaking of investigations, Marcy Wheeler at The Next Hurrah, who's an expert on the Valerie Plame outing, believes that W opted for a commutation instead of a pardon to keep Libby from saving his own ass by talking, while preserving his 5th amendment rights. That would, so the argument goes, make W's move technically obstruction of justice. Josh Marshall says that this is actually the most infuriating part of W's decision, not simply the moral double-standard for his buddies. Remembering that the president is in all likelihood a party in the investigation derailed by Libby (and further derailed by inoculating Libby from flipping), and that the vice president most certainly is a party, changes the entire context of the decision and snaps it into perspective.

Someone on dKos made a good point: does this mean that Paris Hilton got a tougher penalty than Scooter Libby?

Or, as Steve Benen says, is this amnesty by another name? Are we now going to hear conservatives busting out with: "It's not amnesty, he'll still have to pay a fine!"

the Joke Line goes to bat for Libby

Greenwald, as devastating as ever. Read it. I'll just say this: the single most salient point in this whole Libby issue is the fact that both the prosecutor and the judge were Republicans appointed by the president himself.

Also, Glenn very slyly buries this one in a pile of evidence that many people get rolled this hard for perjury all the time, but I think it speaks to many, many things:

New York Times, September 11, 1987 (h/t Attaturk):

The United States Attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani, declared yesterday that the one-year prison sentence that a Queens judge received for perjury was "somewhat shocking."

"A sentence of one year seemed to me to be very lenient," Mr. Giuliani said, when asked to comment on the sentence imposed Wednesday on Justice Francis X. Smith, the former Queens administrative judge. . . .

Justice Smith was convicted of committing perjury before a grand jury investigating corruption in the city, Mr. Giuliani said later, adding that "he could have helped root out corruption" by cooperating with the grand jury.

the vindication of William Jefferson Clinton

10 years later, every single Republican presidential contender, save John McCain, says he should've gotten off without punishment. From ThinkProgress, here's what the leading candidate and former US Attorney said:

Giuliani said the case ... was “incomprehensible” because “ultimately, there was no underlying crime involved.”

Oops, they're actually talking about Scooter Libby, who lied about outing a covert CIA agent working on Iranian WMD to exact political revenge on her husband (and, of course, silence any other potential naysayers among the spooks). That would be the same Iran that's now closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Bill Clinton lied about cheating on his wife, which last time I checked, was not, in fact, illegal.

the dictionary definition of hypocrisy

From TPM:

In the wake of the Libby verdict, Fox News has wheeled out a brigade of legal analysts and their usual TV hosts, all of whom are reaching oddly similar conclusions: The verdict is flawed, and there was no underlying crime.

So the conservative gasbags on FOX News were complaining about the verdict because there was no underlying crime. That is, though Libby lied, he lied about something that is not, in fact, a criminal act. In a perjury and obstruction of justice trial. Of someone in the White House.

Of course, I'm just being facetious. After all, there is a major difference between the two cases: unlike adultery, leaking the identity of a clandestine CIA operative is, in fact, a federal crime. It could even constitute an act of domestic terrorism according to the Patriot Act.

Libby's a new wife

Ruh roh Raggy, here's more bad press for the "faggot" Right and the party of Walter Reed (which Jack Cafferty, BTW, thinks will be the next Katrina). The Republican Vice President's (until his indictment) Chief of Staff is officially a felon, and the line that he was told Plame's identity by reporters is officially a lie.

Ya gotta feel for Tony Snow, it's been one hell of a week and a half.

And the current Resident-in-Chief's approvals?

Zogby: 30%
USA Today/Gallup: 33
Newsweek: 31
FOX/Opinion Dynamics RV: 34
CBS/New York Times: 29 (!)
Time RV: 34
ABC/Washington Post: 36
Diageo/Hotline RV: 36

How much lower will they go? How much lower can they get?