Pardon me Tom Smith

Dick Morris calls Lady Hillary’s criticism of the Scooter Libby commutation hypocrisy.  It’s not quite a defense of the Libby commutation, it’s still a useful history lesson.  In a world of politically fired up special prosecutors and Congress v. White House hard ball over the Iraq war, I think the fuss over the commutation is fairly silly.  I haven’t followed the Libby story closely because it is very complicated and very unedifying.  But given that I don’t like special prosecutors, I don’t think one should have been appointed here, or that there was any crime to investigate, and if there was it was completely within the scope of the usual high political hard ball, I think it’s pretty twee at this stage to get mad at Bush for exercising his executive power to grant clemency.  Presumably the power exists partly to balance out the power of prosecutors gone wild, especially when they have gone wild on officers trying to carry out the foreign policy of the United States, albeit by way of cooking up a stupid story (apparently).

I also feel exactly the same way about the assertion of executive privilege over the Gonzales firings and Cheney doings.  I should think these doings are covered by the privilege; if not, the privilege is too narrow.  But Bush really should not let the Judiciary Committee push him around on this.  He needs to be a man on this one (which I mean, of course, in the gender neutral sense).  That it is all politics could not be more obvious, and the Executive power includes the power to screw up, or it is no power at all.