I'd stay inside today, as the skies are teaming with pigs. If you must venture out, take a sturdy umbrella to deflect airborne droppings. The hyper-conservative Washington Times editorial page partly broke from its shrieking crowd re: President Bush's commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence:
"Perjury is a serious crime. This newspaper argued on behalf of its seriousness in the 1990s, during the Clinton perjury controversy, and today is no different. We'd have hoped that more conservatives would agree. The integrity of the judicial process depends on fact-finding and truth-telling. A jury found Libby guilty of not only perjury but also obstruction justice and lying to a grand jury. It handed down a very supportable verdict. This is true regardless of the trumped-up investigation and political witch hunt. It is true regardless of the unjustifiably harsh sentence."
We'll have to agree to disagree on the "trumped-up" part. Ever-reasonable conservative Andrew Sullivan weighed in with this:
"I think you can argue that the perjury issue was incidental to the original crime. You can even argue that there was no crime. But you cannot argue that Libby's testimony was not perjury...; or that premeditated perjury by a leading figure in the government is not something the legal system has a duty to punish clearly...."
Mercury Rising points out that the Cato Institute criticized Bush's commutation, citing examples of far harsher sentences that Bush has failed to commute. Is our nation's political discourse destined to become more reason-based and less emotional?
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