Posted by
Mike Bates on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:25:09 PM
Maureen Dowd's New York Times opinion piece yesterday was
"Cheney and the Goat Devil."
The mainstream media are reveling in the purported falling out between
former President George Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Supposedly the two disagreed over granting Cheney's previous chief of
staff, Scooter Libby, a pardon. Dowd joins in the fun:
There were clues in the last couple of years that W.
and Condi were trying to sidle away from Cheney by using the forbidden
strategy of diplomacy in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and by
cutting loose Rummy.
As one official who worked closely with both W. and Cheney told The
New York Daily News’s Tom DeFrank the last week of the administration:
“It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard the president say, ‘Run
that by the vice president’s office.’ You used to hear that all the
time.”
The clearest sign of disaffection we have is Bush’s refusal to
pardon Scooter Libby, the man known as “Cheney’s Cheney,” despite
Vice’s tense and emotional pleading. It was his final, too little, too
late “You are not the boss of me” spurning of Dick Cheney.
It may seem pointless for W. to worry about his legacy at this
juncture, but he clearly did not want to add a Marc Rich blot to all
the other gigantic blots on the copybook.
Approximating the Marc Rich case to that of Scooter Libby is akin to
comparing Barney Frank to John Wayne. They have almost nothing in
common, something even Dowd may have noticed.
As Time Magazine reported soon after Bill Clinton pardoned Rich, who had been on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List:
In 1983, Rich was indicted in federal court of evading
more than $48 million in taxes. He was also charged with 51 counts of
tax fraud and with running illegal oil deals with Iran during the
hostage crisis.
Furthermore, Time noted, "Marc Rich's socialite ex-wife has donated
an estimated $1 million to Democratic causes, including $70,000 to
Hillary Clinton's successful Senate campaign and $450,000 to the
Clinton presidential library fund."
In contrast, Scooter Libby greatest crime was at worst lying. The New York Times reported:
I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice
President Dick Cheney, was convicted today of lying to a grand jury and
to F.B.I. agents investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A.
operative in the summer of 2003 amid a fierce public dispute over the
war in Iraq.
Senior U.S. News & World Report writer Michael Barone succinctly explained what had transpired in the Libby case:
Libby was a dedicated and hypercompetent public servant
who was brought down by a prosecutor investigating a scandal that
wasn't a scandal. The investigation purportedly was an attempt to
discover who had told Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA
"operative" (Novak's word). But prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew
before the investigation began that the leaker was Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage. It is astonishing that Armitage and his friend
and boss Secretary of State Colin Powell didn't inform Bush of this and
allowed two of his top aides, Libby and Karl Rove, to be harassed by
Fitzgerald for months and years.
There is no comparison between Marc Rich and Scooter Libby. Still,
had Bush done the unthinkable and actually pardoned Libby, no doubt
we'd have heard about it incessantly from the mainstream media for
years to come. You'd think that Scooter Libby had been on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List.