By PHK
This was a very strange Fourth of July. In fact the whole week has been bizarre.
The Fourth is usually when the lethargy brought on by the summer’s heat turns the country somnolent. This is the time for fireworks, picnics, parades and family outings. Work stops, WV hits decline, politicians return home for the recess to assess the mood of their constituents, most people head for the shore or their cabins in the mountains, and W goes to chop wood on his Crawford, Texas plantation er, I mean, ranch. Reagan, of course, used to clear brush at his in the Santa Barbara hills but those hills at least catch an ocean breeze and morning fog that keep the temperature down making chopping wood and clearing brush less prone to frying the brain.
But something didn’t happen this year. I suppose one can argue that it began with the UK doctors’ plot which just goes to show for all sorts of sane reasons that MDs should stick with healing and forego seemingly mindless – and clearly bungled - acts of brain-dead terrorism. Then there was the almost non-meeting between W and Putin in Kennebunkport followed immediately by W’s surprise, air-mailed decision to commute Scooter Libby’s 30 month sentence supposedly because of its harshness (which it wasn’t) on Monday – two days before the Fourth. More than anything else, the commutation really set the tone for the rest of the week.
Frankly, I don’t see why Libby should get a get out of jail free card – or the option left open for a formal pardon before W’s out of office – and looks like I’m not even part of the minority for a change. I’m just not a diehard support my president right-or-wrong type of person.
Furthermore, it was apparently just A-OK with W that Paris Hilton and Martha Stewart have/d to serve sentences. He didn’t pardon or commute them.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann’s call for W and Cheney to resign has merit – except that Republicans still control far too many Congressional seats to make it feasible.
Clearly the Libby sentence commutation was a Cheney brainchild to keep
1) a loyal employee and confidante out of the slammer for beneficent reasons
2) and/or a loyal employee from not spilling the beans about his and perhaps others personal engagement in a pernicious, illegal cover-up of a lie. After all, if Libby decided the jail house – even a minimum security prison - was not comfortable enough for him he just might stop playing the clam and turn state’s witness. Who knows where that might lead.
Since I’m a political realist, I vote for reason two. Beneficence is as beneficence does, and someone who peppered his own friend and hunting partner’s face with bird-shot – then tried to keep it secret from even the president – does not seem to me to be a person who comes from the compassionate side of the house. This is also not someone who is very likely to bestow humanitarian aid either at home or abroad unless it provides some kind of personal political or financial payoff.
Bush’s finger prints are not exactly lily-white either. After all, this is a man who is known for not commuting sentences – even if the accused did repent. And we already know that his chief right hand man, Karl Rove was part of that same smear-Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame campaign as Libby. If it were up to me, the lawyer who tipped off Rove – as well as Rove - deserves jail time too. Isn’t there something in the US legal code to make it possible? Or shouldn’t there be?
And what are Fitzgerald's options - now that W has made a laughingstock of our legal system? Libby sentence was commuted after all, the man has not (yet) been pardoned.
Iraq, Iraq, Iraq: A Revolt in the Ranks?
If there is good news, it’s that several heavy weight Republicans are having second thoughts about the efficacy of the troop surge in Iraq and are publicly signaling that it's time for change.
Senator Richard Lugar (Indiana) began the possible defection in a widely carried speech just before the holiday began. And New Mexico’s Pete Domenici followed suit shortly there after. They’ve clearly tested the political waters at home, looked at their own poll numbers, seen the dismal fund-raising figures for Republican presidential candidates generally and decided enough is enough of this president’s suicidal policies.
Domenici’s awakening was particularly interesting – and in many ways clever – because he told reporters that he made his decision after talking with a New Mexico family whose son had been killed in Iraq and who told him that they wanted the troops home so others would not have the same cross to bear. This undercuts the White House’s mantra of the imperative to fund its continuous war because of the imperative to support the troops. Unfortunately, no members of Congress heeded Cindy Sheehan when she tried to make the same point several years ago.
The bottom line, however, will be the proof in the pudding.
If Senators Domenici, Lugar, Voinovich, Warner and other influential Republicans in the Senate and the House endorse the Iraq Study Group recommendations and/or sign on to a bipartisan resolution that puts US troops on track to leave by fall 2008 but fail to put the financial and legal teeth behind them – as happened earlier this year when they – and others grumbled or insisted upon supporting “their president right or wrong” and supported a funding increase that allowed the occupation to continue indefinitely and enabled the surge, then all of this is Republican party political window dressing designed to shore up sagging poll numbers.
I realize Senator J. William Fulbright was not exactly a popular figure with the Johnson Administration when he turned against the continued US military intervention in Vietnam. But sometimes it’s far more effective for influential members of a president’s own party to stand up, travel across town, put their feet down and tell the Commander-in-Chief that his imperial, above the law, presidency is no longer tenable. I’m waiting to see this happen.