Riding piggy on Scooter

 

 

Bush is brash. He is blatantly audacious when it comes to protecting his cronies. He throws away all suggestions, advice and rule books into the dustbin, to shower benedictions of high office on to those who support his lies about invading and occupying Iraq. This is exactly what Bush has proved by commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence and granting him “Get Out of Jail Free Card”.

Bush’s defence of this so-called benevolent act is that Libby, ”his wife and young children have also suffered immensely. . . The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.” Furthermore, Bush & co. is using the precedence set by Clinton towards the fag end of his Presidency when he pardoned Marc Rich (a fugitive financier). The fact that Bush has performed this rather un-pardonable act when he still has more than a year of his Presidential term intact goes to prove that Bush & Cheney are merciless towards democratic norms when it comes to covering their own misdemeanors in launching a smear campaign against Valerie and Joe Wilson.

This audacious act by Bush has generated large indignation and resentment in US. “The recent commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence, however, was the straw that broke my camel’s back of exhausted ennui,” Cindy Sheehan, a peace activist shared with TSI. It is not just the Leftists who are clamouring against Bush, even Wall Street Journal, a newspaper known to be sympathetic to Republicans writes that Bush “describes the case for and against the Libby sentence with an antiseptic neutrality that would lead one to conclude that somehow the whole event was merely the result of Mr. Libby gone bad as a solo operator.”

Bush in his capacity as an individual has all rights to throw caution to wind and subject himself to be bombarded by brickbats, but what he can’t afford to do is throw the American freedom into the dustbin of history.