Scooter Libby: Guilty Verdict

It was tax evasion that sent Al Capone to jail…it was lying about Watergate that tossed Richard Nixon out of office…and it is the Valerie Plame affair that has finally resulted in the first guilty verdict against a high-level Bush Administration operative.

In all of these cases there were far greater crimes for which the criminals were not brought to justice. Though in the case of the Bush administration, the least ethical presidential administration since at least Warren Harding and possibly in the history of our nation, there is still time to bring some cases.

And this same Bush who said he would deal harshly with anyone found to be implicated in the Plame leak has so far refused to rule out the possibility of pardoning Libby (and it was almost Karl Rove).

Why there has been no serious move for impeachment is beyond me. After all, Clinton was dragged through it for lying about his sex life–something that while not showing him to be a very responsible person, didn’t really impact anyone except Bill, Hillary, and Monica.

The Bush-Cheney bulldozer on the other hand, has left a trail of misfeasance, malfeasance, and plain old incompetence on a grand scale. The wreckage spreads from New Orleans to Palm Beach County to Baghdad and beyond, and touches virtually every corner of society: corruption, favoritism, abridgment of rights, basing foreign policy on a series of lies, retaliation against critics, and on and on.

I will not repeat the long litany of High Crimes and Misdemeanors here; they’re widely available elsewhere–it took me about ten seconds to find this link, for instance–and this is only a partial list.

This gang of thugs should never have been allowed to take power, and certainly not allowed to keep it. But I am confident that even if this group of rouges who have turned the US into a Rogue State are not brought to justice on this Earth, they will need to account for their evil deeds in a different venue. And I, for one, am extremely glad that I don’t have the weight of such actions on my own conscience.