Guilty of being (R)
When it comes to the Great Fitzmas Fizzle, here’s a piece that pretty much says it all, and doesn’t pull any punches saying it. As such, it’s a natural fit here:
Patrick Fitzgerald fulminated in court about a cloud over the Vice President in an effort to suggest that there was something dark and sinister about administration officials discussing Valerie Plame with reporters after her husband injected her into a national controversy. That suggestion is pure left-wing fantasy.
In sum, the evidence against Libby was that his memory of the sequence and details of perfectly innocent events of no great importance differed from that of other witnesses. The judge who let this case go to the jury is one or more of the following: a nitwit, a coward, and/or a partisan hack. The jury that convicted was prejudiced, stupid or both.
I think we can put that second proposition to bed pretty easily, with the correct answer being “C.” But we can talk about jurors who ought to be put into some sort of home for the malignantly imbecilic — or, alternatively, a cot three nights a week in DNC HQ — later. Right now:
Fitzgerald never had any reason to believe that there was a crime to be solved in the “CIA leak case.” Nothing in the U.S. code purports to make talking about Valerie Plame a crime. Fitzgerald never had any legitimate grounds for pursuing a criminal investigation because he never had even the theoretical possibility of a crime to investigate.
His own conduct strongly suggests that he knew this from the beginning.
Well, I’d say there’s no sense excerpting any more, when what you really need to be doing is reading the whole sick-making thing.
Update! Okay, I mulled it over, and no way can I leave this bit out, speaking as it does to the very heart of every single last problem we are currently facing:
More than half way through his second term the President still hasn’t been able to take control of his own government. The Libby case reached its sad conclusion because the elements within both the CIA and the DOJ used some of the President’s own powers to attack him. Still he does nothing.
As Allahpundit might say, exit question — and one of the most depressing imaginable: how many other rapidly deteriorating political crises are we now embroiled to the eyeteeth in, because the current occupant of the White House — and that’s about all he is at this point — refused to take vigorous and proper action at the moment when it would have done the most good?
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