Libby is less Guilty than Clinton

I could be wrong, but this is what it looks like here at the bottom.

Ever since Bill Clinton was impeached in December, 1998 we have been told so many times that it was all about sex that the Pavlovian among us have been trained to believe it. It wasn’t about sex. It was about rape (Juanita Broaddrick) and sexual harassment (Paula Jones) – crimes that people typically either go to jail for or lose their jobs over.

While it is true that the very narrow scope of Ken Starr’s investigation was the Monica Lewinski affair, there is no doubt that without the preceding and underlying scandals, it would not have reached the constitutional crisis stage. Nobody really wanted to impeach Clinton. He forced it. It was a political loser from the beginning for Republicans. If they had been successful in the impeachment proceedings, Al Gore would have been catapulted into the White House, and would have been reelected in 2000 on the sympathy vote. The analogy is locking up Al Capone for tax evasion instead of the many other more heinous crimes that was his true legacy.

In the Clinton case, there was, at least, an acknowledged crime committed. Even his supporters acknowledged that he lied about sex; they admitted that he lied. What else could he have done, after all? Well, for one thing, he could have told us that it was none of our business and refused to answer questions about it. Perjury is a crime. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that other, more serious crimes were committed – crimes like rape and sexual harassment.

Scooter Libby, on the other hand, may have lied or not. He may have honestly had a memory lapse or not. He may have been attempting to use delaying tactics to soften the blow when it was finally discovered that there was no underlying crime committed or not. Since there was no underlying crime, Libby had no reason to lie. There goes the motive. But apparently, Patrick Fitzgerald, a United States Attorney with a previously stellar reputation in my native Chicago, decided that in the national arena of anti-Bush politics, a motive is a minor annoyance – like lying about “sex.”

So let’s see. Clinton gets off (no pun intended, honestly) because he lied about sex, even though it was not all about sex. It was about rape and sexual harassment. Libby is put on trial because he may or may not have lied about NOTHING.

The Republicans are vilified about spending millions of our dollars to prosecute someone his supporters admitted committed the crime he was accused of. Democrats spend some number of dollars that the Republicans are too afraid to discover and tell us about to prosecute someone who, it appears, is probably not guilty of doing anything.

So, more time and money is wasted for the personal gain of politicians who feel the need to put on a show is a higher priority than doing the peoples work. Nice job, elected officials.