Saturday Morning Quickie

Don't you just love it when an editorial sort of makes sense, even when the writer clings to falsehoods? I don't think Bush stands for anything positive, but you wouldn't know it by the hero worshiping tones of John Kass. He's fatuously going on about Bush's supposed virtues and then takes a quick left turn into reality.

It involves the rule of law. Conservatives were once quite conversant with the phrase while applying it to Democratic presidential stains on a blue dress. Lately though, many have willed themselves to forget, rather than look in the mirror and see their own eyes staring, searching for something irretrievably lost when they abandoned principle for party loyalty.

Last week, on the day before we Americans celebrated our independence, the president announced that he would commute the prison sentence of Scooter Libby.

Libby, the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted by a jury and sentenced to prison for obstructing justice and lying under oath to a grand jury in the investigation of who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to a newspaper columnist.

The politics of Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, were not the politics of the president, they were perceived as a threat to his Iraq policy, so there was a leak to discredit them, and another insider did the leaking.

But Libby did much of the lying—to investigators, to a grand jury. The jury that convicted him considered him a fall guy for Cheney. Libby's champions argue that since leaker Richard Armitage was not charged, how could Libby be sentenced when there was no crime?

Nonsense. There was a crime. Libby lied. Under oath.

Everybody gets blackmailed at some point in their lives. Maybe not for money, (I'm gonna tell ...)but sooner or later we are placed in a position where we are forced to make a decision. Do what the person wants, which is against our best interests, or be honest and take our lumps. For me this is not a difficult choice but then my dad is gone, I'm not rich, famous or running for public office so I can afford to take the high road. Plus, my authority issues prevent me from allowing someone without a gun to push me around.

Oh well, I owe, I owe, so it's off to work I go.