Follow the Argument ... If You Can!

For months and months, all of the chat was how President Bush would be forced to pardon Scooter Libby or Libby would be off to federal prison. Of course, it all turned out to be wrong, a clumsy fiction. There were at least four ways that Bush could keep Libby out of prison short of a pardon and he chose one of them.

Flush with embarrassment, critics quickly shifted the focus from their bogus analysis to psychoanalysis of the President's motive for the commutation of sentence. The President stopped short of a pardon, they said, because Libby would lose constitutional protections and stand bare before congressional committees which would trace misconduct straight to the highest reaches of government like a rocket. The newly introduced theory seems to ignore the fact that Libby testified for eight hours over several days regarding his memory of who told him what. That doesn't seem to reek of a general sense of shyness or the desire to hide.

But, more damning, is that all of the persons with this new theory were nowhere to be found before the commutation. And I do mean nowhere. Go ahead, try to find a single person, anywhere, who was saying (before the commutation), "there is no way the President will grant a pardon, because Libby will be forced to rat him out." No one was saying that, at the time. And that says quite a lot - about the theory and those who are now touting it.

And the problems with the new theory do not end there. Because, if we are to accept it, then there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to believe President Bush will grant a full, unconditional pardon to Libby before he leaves office. No reason to ask about it, because it will never happen - not according to the theory. And yet, Bush was asked about the possibility of a pardon, by the same press that was pushing the new theory, almost immediately. And everyone is still speculating about the forthcoming pardon.

Why?

Because even the persons pushing the uninformed, limited-vision, after-the-fact theory concerning the President's commutation motives do not have faith in its validity. Sure, it is pleasing enough to those have a taste for it (and the kind of thinking that produced it), but it is not worth two seconds of serious thought.