Libby: G. Gordon or Scooter, They’re All Criminal To Me

I guess I’m supposed to be mad at the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence, but normally you have to be taken aback by something to be angry, and this is probably the most predictable presidential action since the last bad decision Bush made. (Choose your own; there’s no shortage.) But the point is, it was predictable.

The time to be mad about this was probably when he was convicted. If on the day of the conviction, you somehow thought Libby wasn’t going to be pardoned, you should probably also see a doctor about the inordinate amount of time you spend submerging your grill-piece in grains of silica. I will give Bush credit: he surprised us with the speed that he arrived at the incredibly bald-faced decision we knew all he’d eventually make. I was thinking fall 2008 or so, but it’s not even mid-summer 2007 and we’re already witnessing the bending of justice. (Note to Tony Snow: keeping Libby away from justice is clearly worse than Clinton’s pardons, because it’s pretty obvious that Al Gore didn’t go to Marc Rich and order him to break the law. We can’t be quite so sure about Dick Cheney going to Libby.)

Keith Olbermann is certainly right here, but we’ve come to the point where we have two options: impeachment / resignation (as if!), or battening down until January 2009. (The latter being contingent on us not going to war with Iran. Should he opt for that, all Bush has to lose are many thousands of human lives, and that hasn’t proven to bother him so far.)

Though I think the president’s actions more than warrant impeachment, the Republicans unwittingly did themselves a favor by impeaching Bill Clinton: that was such a partisan joke that the pooch of impeachment has been good and screwed for at least a generation or so going forward, and it just doesn’t seem like something the country is willing to go through again, even though the case for Bush’s impeachment just gets stronger and stronger all the time.

I still can’t believe all these G.O.P. jokers I see interning on the Hill, like the events of today aren’t even happening. Is impeachment justified? I think so. Will it happen? F no, it won’t.

2009, where you at!