Liar Libby

Former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby was found Guilty today on 4 of 5 felony charges including perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. On the show that bears his name, Lou Dobbs wondered what brought Libby to this sorry verdict, asking legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, “what happened here?” Toobin’s bizarre response: “It’s really baffling.”

No Jeffrey, it’s not baffling at all. It’s quite simple…

Dick Cheney’s lie about enriched uranium going from Niger to Iraq was exposed and challenged by Ambassador Joe Wilson. Dick organized his advisors to smear Wilson. Part of that campaign included implying that Wilson was a sissy because his CIA wife, Valerie Plame, sent him to Niger. Plame’s job as a covert agent at the CIA was thus blown—a potential crime—and an investigation was launched. Cheney was terrified that he might be implicated in the crime or exposed as an unethical thug. So his right-hand-man, Libby, lied to cover the tracks back to Cheney.

And now Libby is facing serious jail time while the Bush administration is reeling from another major scandal.

President Bush today sent a low-level staff member to inform the press that he accepted the verdict of the jury—in other words, he wasn’t planning to exercise his Imperial power to nullify the verdict just yet. But like a defiant grade-schooler unwilling to accept yet another loss, Dick Cheney came to Scooter’s defense. Despite the very foundation of the Vice Presidency crumbling, Tricky Dick II would rather risk further damaging the Presidency of Dubya than come clean about a dirty, rotten scheme of his own making that went public.

And other hard-core, evidence-be-damned conservatives like pundit Ed Rodgers absolutely, categorically refuse to admit to any mistakes, miscalculations or shortcomings of what most of the rest of the world now considers the worst American Presidency in modern history.

Believing that they can do no wrong, that they know better than “the little people” public, and that anyone who disagrees with them is an unpatriotic, Commie Judas, the Cheney dead-enders will only be cowed by the judgment of history. But if an easier political prediction were ever possible, I’m not aware of it: the Bush crew will be seen by history as a nepotistic, ineffective, incompetent, blundering, divisive, scheming, arrogant, secretive, tyrannical, bullying pack of liars.

Sadly, that’s not hyperbole. It’s not even an exaggeration. Their long and growing list of failures and scandals leads firmly, inexorably to that conclusion. Indeed, in six years they’ve accomplished little except to increase the wealth of the wealthy. The only other “accomplishment” they regularly claim is that the nation hasn’t yet been completely destroyed by our enemies. As if they had any significant influence over that fact.

Meanwhile, red-faced Bush conservatives continue to shriek that their lily-white standard bearers are being falsely accused and persecuted, even as their neo-con movement dissolves and the public stands poised to toss them onto the ash-heap of history.

At this stage, nothing could be more absurd than an enraged conservative denying fact after fact. It’s a momentous, shameful disgrace, brought home this week by the conviction of Scooter Libby, liar.

- JT Compton