Because you're killing us, you really are, and you're no good at it anyway. Your attempt to reduce the astounding case of Libby and the leak to workaday, business-as-usual politics, and to apply a fair-mindedness that (by your calculation) must cut against whatever you percieve to be the Democratic line, is just too much. There is nothing workaday, business-as-usual about what Bush and Cheney have been up to for the last 70 months. This isn't about political parties and winning and losing and being honest and fair and avoiding things like the politicization of politics. It's not about letting their guys go because our guys got off when they got caught doing something remotely related, if you squint, kind of.

Please, try hard to understand how appallingly calculated all of this was. Libby was involved in a complicated and highly successful propaganda campaign. This campaign turned illegal when he and his handlers decided that it would serve the interests of their war to disclose the identity of a CIA agent involved in nonproliferation work. Libby understood the legal status of his actions, and this is why he lied about what he did to the grand jury, over and over. He also presumably knew that the president had his ass covered, which explains why he persisted in lying even when the clouds started to gather. Now that his sentence has been commuted, he can avoid further testimony by pleading the fifth. And, of course, everyone from Gonzales on down now knows, if they didn't already, that they can expect similar treatment should they need to lie to another prosecutor or another grand jury to protect the guys at the top. The guys at the top are in need of a whole lot of protection of this sort, in case you hadn't noticed, so you can appreciate how useful this message is.

In this context you have to be seriously deluded to suggest that Clinton, who was never convicted of perjury, can even begin to provide any kind of precedent. But others in the Fray have made this point more forcefully and learnedly than I can.

I only want to add that Bush and Cheney, and the legions of Libbys who protect them, and even some of the voters out there who still support them, don't just want to control Congress, or get Republicans elected to the presidency, or appoint conservative judges. They don't just want people to vote for them. They want want a one-party system, and all the power that will accrue to them as a result. They want the power to invade countries when they feel like it, for whatever reason at all. They want the power to hold their enemies indefinitely, without charges, and the power to torture prisoners, and to eavesdrop on your phone calls. They want the power to modify legislation at will and the power to circumvent Congress should it try to deny them funding or investigate their actions. For years they have been hard at work turning the federal government into an extension of the Republican Party, replacing impartial career officials with party operatives and using government agencies and public funding to promote party interests and stay in power. Libby was a part of this effort. He used the machinery of government to retaliate against one dissenter and perhaps scare others into silence.

So this isn't really about politics anymore; it's about preserving our system of government. By failing to recognize that--by adhering to specious notions of fairness and relating Libby's case to the archetypal controversy of partisan politics (Clinton and the blow job)--you give them cover. You turn the commutation of Libby's sentence into just another of those things that divide Republicans and Democrats, into just another move in an old political game that (so the standard line goes) may be tedious, may be a waste of time, may even be hypocritical, but is ultimately harmless. Yet there's nothing harmless about what Libby did, and there's nothing harmless about the many implications of Bush's intervention.

Please, try to see that there is far more than fair-mindedness at stake here.

You should be the writer for Slate.great post!

Agreed. Maybe they can fire Noah and replace him with someone like this, who actually thinks through an issue before submitting an opinion.