It may be legal but it's not right

I am not a lawyer. I have never played a lawyer on TV. The closest I’ve been to a real lawyer is my college roommate, who is a successful lawyer in Ohio. The blog name Lex E. Libertas – Latin for Law and Liberty – is a high-minded reference to the US Constitution and the freedoms and responsibilities it enshrines. I try to stay away from all things legal because sure as the sun rises in the East, as soon as you say, “he did it” some other guy confesses. Or “that guy’s being railroaded” they find the murder weapon in his basement.

All that said, I’ve been following the Scooter Libby trial on MSNBC and in the Daily Punctilio here in Ft. Wayne. Libby is on trial for perjury as to when and from whom he first heard that Lyin’ Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. But if you watch MSNBC or read the Daily Punctilio, you’d swear the trial was about manipulation of prewar intelligence. Christy Matthews, David Schuster and Keith Olbermann are all beside themselves. God forbid Libby should be acquitted, they will all require years of therapy.

What never makes it into the MSNBC conversation is that Joe Wilson is a lying sack of excrement. Further none of the great MSNBC thinkers remind the viewer that it was brave courageous Richard – and if ever a guy should be called Dick – Armitage who admitted leaking Lyin’ Joe’s wife’s name to Bob Novak - which started the whole Special Prosecutor thing.

So brave Richard the Dick goes about hobnobbing with the jet set while Rove, Libby et al are being hauled before the Grand Jury multiple times and at great expense to the government and the individuals involved to find out what Richard the Dick and the Special Prosecutor already knew. Richard the Dick also let NY Times reporter Judith Miller cool her heels in prison for over a month. And this is what the fat, bald Uncle Fester look-alike with third world dental work – Richard the Dick – calls being a man.

Then as if that were not enough to make a sane man’s head spin, the CIA gal who was outted turns out not to have been outted at all. Turns out she was just a run of the mill government bureaucrat who happened to drive in and out of the front gate at Langley everyday and was married to a lyin’ Walter Middy type.

The Special Prosecutor knew all of this. He knew that Lyin’ Joe’s wife wasn’t a covered agent and that no crime had been committed by mentioning her name. He knew that Richard the Dick committed the non-crime of mentioning her name. Still the prosecutor continued to haul people before the Grand Jury. There, apparently Scooter Libby lied about or forgot details of the non-crime that others remembered. So now, Libby is on trial for his freedom. Did he lie or just forget the sequence of events? I don’t know.

It’s a sign of a weak argument, I think, when you point to other bad behavior to justify something. That said, look at the other side of the political aisle. Sandy Burger steals and destroys top secret papers from the National Archives and gets off essentially Scott free while Libby faces years in jail for a faulty memory – or at worst – deceiving the Special Prosecutor about events the prosecutor knew were not a crime and even who had committed the non-crime in the first place. Only in America. Only in Washington DC. Only Democrats.