CT Blue

I’ve been spending a little quality time reading the Libby Letters. You can download the full text here at the Smoking Gun, where they’ve also posted them in order of despicableness, starting with Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, and Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton. With friends like those…

I loved Wolfowitz’s opening:

I am currently serving, until June 30th of this year, as President of the World Bank.

You don’t say.

It should be noted here that Dick Cheney, who would certainly have had pride of place in the Raw Story parade of odiousness, chose to stay silent in his lair.

Among the more bizarre features of these letters is the fact that in at least two of them the writers praised Libby’s sex with animals (or was it sex between two animal species, I forget) novel.

What comes across most spectacularly is the refusal of the Beltway nobility to wrap their minds around the fact that the law really does apply to them too. There is virtually no recognition in these letters that Libby did anything wrong. In fact, in many, there is an out and out rejection of the jury verdict, despite the massive evidence against him. Others make the implicit claim that what Libby did doesn’t matter, because he was working on the side of truth and justice. Others support his “memory” defense. Not a single one of his supporters acknowledges the harm he helped cause to Plame or the fact that he has essentially acted as a firewall for Cheney. There is an implied consensus among them: the little people have no right to know what’s going on in their government, and the rules don’t apply to the big people.

You can see why these letters didn’t appear to have much affect on the judge, who said during sentencing that “Evidence in this case overwhelmingly indicated Mr. Libby’s culpability“.

It’s hard to believe that the judge could have been impressed by pleas from the privileged that explicitly or implicitly rejected that judgment. A little less hubris might have helped.

The judge indicated that Libby will do time pending appeal. Whatever the Beltway types may think, the judge obviously thinks that Libby needs to do time, and he’s not about to let Libby run out the clock until November of 2008. Here’s hoping he sticks to his guns on that point.