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MSNBC's Keith Olberman, never one to shrink from controversy, tonight called upon Pres. Bush and Vice President Cheney to resign in wake of the President's decision to commute the prison sentence for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Olberman said the resignations would spare the nation the pain of impeachment proceedings. Calling the commutation "a pardon in all but name," Olberman said Bush "stabbed the nation in the back," adding:
I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.
I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.
I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.
I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.
I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.
I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.
I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.
And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory… to the obstruction of justice.
Olberman offered no evidence that Bush had given Libby such assurances, but he is not alone in his thinking that it must have happened. For example, Marcy Wheeler argued that the commutation is an obstruction of justice designed to keep us from knowing exactly what the President and Vice President's roles were in the affair. Whether those who share Olberman's view are willing to through their support behind a resign-or-be-impeached movement is another matter.
However, what is equally clear is that Libby and Bush have their supporters as well. The depth of the division in this case speaks volumes about the challenge of achieving e pluribus unum on the eve of the 231st anniversary of the US declaration of its independence from tyranny.
From the blogosphere:
At Firedoglake, PhoenixWoman says that Bush commuted Libby's sentence
instead of pardoning him to keep Libby from being forced to testify against his old bosses:
[A] full pardon strips away Scooter’s ability to hide behind the Fifth Amendment when asked to testify under oath about Bush’s and Cheney’s involvement in outing Valerie Plame.
Diane Silver says the President's decision to accept the verdict, but nullify part of the sentence, is a "farce:"
If the judicial system failed so decisively in this case, then Libby should have been pardoned completely. If the system did not fail, then there is no rationale for a president to step in and override only part of a judge's sentence.
There appear to be two systems of justice in this nation. One for the president's friends and one for the rest of us. Heaven help those of us who fall down on the wrong side of that partition.
But Ann Althouse points to David Brooks' defense of the decision in the New York Times. Brooks also sees a farce, but of a different kind:
His decision to commute Libby’s sentence but not erase his conviction was exactly right. It punishes him for his perjury, but not for the phantasmagorical political farce that grew to surround him. It takes away his career, but not his family.
Meanwhile, Tom Maguire at Just One Minute calls the decision, "a slick straddle."
What say you? The responses to Erin's post make it
