Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Plain & Simple - Cheney is a Thug
Bromell, an English professor, author and staunch Iraq War critic wrote:
I've known Scooter since we were both 11-year-old "new boys" at a boarding school in New England. Later we were roommates, co-captains of the debating team, and later still we both went to Andover. We had the same teachers, read the same books, and played hundreds of hours of touch football together. We were close friends, drawn to each other not just by shared interests but by a shared position on the cruel status ladder of these elite prep schools. In a world dominated by rich WASP jocks, we were both too small to play varsity sports. Scooter was a Jew. I was a scholarship boy whose family never owned a new car.
[...]
So, I ask: How could Scooter work enthusiastically for politicians who enflame and profit from anti-gay hysteria, when he is not himself a homophobe? How could he work untiringly for politicians who denied the fact of global warming, when he himself respects science? How could he pledge fealty to men allied with the Christian right, when he himself is secular and rational? (If his local public school started mandating the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, Scooter would certainly yank his kids out and send them off to Andover.) In short, how could someone like him work for the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney?
Let's face it; she just doesn't like the idea of locking a human being in a prison cell unless it's absolutely necessary to protect the public. The most convincing Libby defense argument is that he will not be in a position to commit a similar crime in the future; although all the minor felons in the Nixon and Reagan administration seem to have come back to bite America in the ass one more time.
But everyone knows that Vice President Cheney is the person directly responsible for the entire sordid Plamegate affair; and everyone also knows that Libby is not going to rat out the v/p. So what does it profit to see Scooter get hauled off to prison?!?
Suffice it to say that in the early 80s when HL watched "Miami Vice," one of the show's main attraction for her is that often the so-called bad guy would get off scot-free; and just as often, the character was never fully evil and black; now and again, the evildoer had shades of gray.
Yea, Libby broke the law and we are a nation of laws; and yes, a pardon would mean Libby essentially got away with a crime. But on a scale of everything this White House has done, like cooking the intelligence books and then invading a sovereign nation under false pretenses that cost thousands and thousands of lives and so much treasure, did Libby have anything to do with that most heinous crime?!?
Everything can be laid directly at the feet of Darth-Cheney. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a more evil man. Just tonight we learn that he blocked the promotion of the brave patriot who stopped the illegal wiretapping program dead on its track.
The Washington Post headlines, "Cheney Blocked Official's Promotion."
Vice President Dick Cheney blocked the promotion of a Justice Department official involved in a bedside standoff over President Bush's eavesdropping program, a Senate committee learned Wednesday.
In a written account, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey said Cheney warned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that he would oppose the promotion of a department official who once threatened to resign over the program.
Neither vindication of the rule of law nor any other aspect of the public interest requires that Libby go to prison. He is by no stretch a danger to the community, as "danger" is commonly understood. He did not commit his crime out of greed or personal malice.Sounds reasonable to Howling Latina.
