The Washington Post's "Hacktacular" Defense Of Scooter Libby

There they go again.

The Washington Post is once again defending convicted felon Scooter Libby. This time its WaPo columnist (and former Iraq War cheerleader) Richard Cohen who has come to Libby's aid. Here is what Cohen has to say about the Plame Investigation which led to the conviction of his good friend Scooter:

It would not have been conducted if, say, the Iraq war had ended with 300 deaths and the mission had really been accomplished. An unpopular war produced the popular cry for scalps and, in Libby's case, the additional demand that he express contrition -- a vestigial Stalinist-era yearning for abasement. No one has yet explained, though, how Libby can express contrition and still appeal his conviction. No matter. Antiwar sanctimony excuses the inexplicable.

Accountability is one thing. By all means, let Congress investigate and conduct oversight hearings with relish and abandon. But a prosecution is a different matter. It entails the government at its most coercive -- a power so immense and sometimes so secretive that it poses much more of a threat to civil liberties, including freedom of the press, than anything in the interstices of the scary Patriot Act. The mere arrival of a form letter from the IRS will give any sane person a touch of angina.

I don't expect George Bush to appreciate this. He is the privileged son of a privileged son, and he fears nothing except, probably, doubt. But the rest of us ought to consider what Fitzgerald has wrought and whether we are better off for his efforts. I have come to hate the war and I cannot approve of lying under oath -- not by Scooter, not by Bill Clinton, not by anybody. But the underlying crime is absent, the sentence is excessive and the investigation should not have been conducted in the first place. This is a mess. Should Libby be pardoned? Maybe. Should his sentence be commuted? Definitely.

Let me see if I got this right. A Republican-appointed prosecutor gets perjury and obstruction convictions in a jury trial presided over by a Republican-appointed judge in a case where the evidence clearly supported the verdict, and the Washington Post is acting as if history's greatest miscarriage of justice just took place.

Give me a fucking break.

I could go on and on about this and the rest of the Washington Post's bullshit on this topic, but Eric Boehlert has done a much better job than I could ever do. His analysis can be found here.

By the way, TPMMuckraker is reporting that Steven Griles, the former No. 2 guy at the Interior Department, got a 10-month prison sentence for lying to congressional investigators about his ties to Jack Abramoff. The prosecutor on that case was only asking for a prison term of five months. I'm certain the Washington Post is going to have a problem with the sentence as well.