Tim Noah offers up the fact that nobody has ever persued Clinton's alleged perjury as a justification for the notion that, even though Scooter Libby was convicted in a court of law for perjury and obstruction of justice, Libby should somehow be exempt from punishment.
This is indeed a curious turn of logic! As most of us know, nobody has yet to be punished for the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. By Noah's logic, anybody who has been convicted of murder in the past thirteen years...should have their setence commuted! But wait - at least with the Simpson case, we know that somebody committed murder. With Clinton's alleged perjury, the allegation has not even made it to the level of an indictment. Given that Republicans have been running the DoJ for the past seven years, and given the detailed voluminous report of Ken Starr, surely somebody, somewhere would have pursued an indictment of Clinton if the perjury that Noah alleges were so "obvious".
Perhaps there was a difference between the Clinton case and the Libby case that explains why one never saw a court and the other never was prosecuted and the other was successfully prosecuted in an orderly, legal manner?
Perhaps the best explanation is the simplest. At the time of the impeachment, after all, President Clinton brought forward a letter signed by a large number of prosecutors who affirmed that they would not pursue any indictment against Clinton based on the evidence presented. For starters, the major basis for any perjury indictment would come down to a "he said, she said" interpretation of what actually happened between the President and Monica Lewinsky. Given that Lewinsky herself is an admitted perjurer, this would hardly be much of a legal basis for pursuing a perjury conviction.
The second problem is that the entire pejury allegation against Clinton is based on the convoluted definition of "sexual relations" that was used by the Jones' lawyers during his deposition. Clinton's legal defense throughout has been that he thought he was giving a misleading, but technically true, answer to the question that was posed to him, based on the definition given to him. I dare say that, given the convoluted definition that was used in that deposition, and given what we know (I mean actually "know", as opposed to "presume") about what happened between Clinton and Lewinsky, the President would have a legal defense there.
Ultimately, there really is not a strong parallel between the Clinton non-prosecution and the Libby conviction. But, for a partisan Democrat, it is particularly galling to see anybody use the misuse of the legal system by the Republicans in the Clinton case to justify the misuse of the legal system by the Republicans in the Libby case.
In any case, Noah is falling into the trap of thinking that, as long as the result is equally bad for Republicans and Democrats, then the outcome is just. In case Mr. Noah has not noticed, a large portion of the citizens of the United States are neither Republican nor Democrat. How are the 35% of the population who are independent supposed to feel when Noah offers up his exoneration based on partisan equity?
In any case, I dispute the implied notion that all Americans do (or should) put partisanship ahead of their sense of justice. Back in 2000, what I wanted from the recount in Florida was not necessarily for Gore to win the recount, but for some sort of recount to actually happen! (It never did.) Similarly, if the problem that Noah poses is that Clinton wasn't prosecuted, even though he committed a crime, then the solution is to prosecute Clinton! I mean, isn't this obvious??? When did "but Bill got away with it!" become a legal defense?
The commutation of Libby's sentence is an atrocious use of pardon power to prop up transparently political ends. Indeed, the Republicans have used pardon power repeatedly for exactly this kind of purpose from the days of the Presidency(sic) of Gerald Ford. What about Americans who want to see the laws of the nation enforced, regardless of the partisan affiliation of whoever is the target of prosecution? The legacy of Richard Nixon, Cap Weinberger, Eliott Abrams, Oliver North and now Scooter Libby is that, if you are a Republican, you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want, if you are seeking to increase the power of the Republican party. There is no way to read this sequence of events to avoid the conclusion that the Republicans in power have repeatedly put their own personal interests ahead of the interests of the justice system. Amazingly, Patrick Fitzgerald and Judge Walton managed to place a small speed bump in this process, but with the swing of a pen, George W. Bush has denied justice to the people of America who say that no person should be so politically connected as to escape the law.
As Duncan Black says, George W. Bush has essentially committed obstruction of justice here. He has conspired, along with Vice President Cheney and Scooter Libby, to prevent the justice system from knowing exactly what happened when the crime of publicly outing an undercover operative was committed.
Tim Noah is committing the journalistic crime of seeking a moral equivalence between disparate events, in the name of refusing to come to the judgment that what one party has done was far, far worse than what the other party ever did. Shame on Noah and shame on Slate for publishing this tripe. I hope in the future Slate will not continue to endorse a two-tiered system of justice, where the rich and powerful not only enjoy the inherent advantages they have in any criminal cases (namely, acceess to superior lawyers), but also can rest assured that, even in the worst case, should a person in a position of power ever be actually convicted of anything, he can count on his powerful allies to bail him out, and the lapdog media will give the process its blessing.
Excuse me while I vomit.
