The liberal side of the blogosphere, the Democrats in Congress and the Democratic Presidential candidates have actively criticized Bush's appalling commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Wonky Muse and Tankwoman at The Blue Voice have weighed in with worthwhile thoughts and justified outrage. I just want to add a couple of quick things about the case.
As Josh Marshall reminds us, the real political and historical significance of the whole Plame case (including Scooter's part) has always been its relationship to the phony case Cheney and Bush made for the Iraq War. The alleged nuclear threats - you know, we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud and all that - were always the one piece of the WMD claims that was far and away the most persuasive. Joe Wilson's now-famous trip to Africa and his public criticism of the Cheney-Bush administration that grew out of it pointed not only to the political shame of their deceit. But we need to remember: in both American and international law, ginning up fake causes for a war like the 2003 invasion of Iraq is illegal. Administration officials are surely far more aware of that risk than the punditocracy has been.
The other extremely revealing aspect of the Libby case is that it exposed again the extent to which the mainstream press really has become an Establishment press that identifies itself more-or-less consciously and explicitly with the wealthy and powerful as represented by the Republican Party. As we saw with "Whitewater" and the press "War on Gore", they are more than willing to attack Democrats, even wealthy and powerful ones. But the way our "press corps" and the punditocracy have minimized the significance of the Plame case has above all to do with their own increasingly symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party. They don't care about what in colloquial if not legal terms was an act of treason in exposing Valerie Plame's CIA status for cheap political payback. They do care about protecting their friends and "inside sources" like Scooter.
Tags: establishment press, mainstream press, plame case, scooter libby
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