"It's disgusting that people are still obsessed with Gotti and the mob," { Victoria Gotti} told The Daily News. "They should be obsessed with that mob in Washington. They have 3,000 deaths on their hands." …True, the Washington mob isn't as sexy as the Gotti or Soprano clans, but there is now a gripping nonfiction dramatization of its machinations available gratis on the Internet, no HBO subscription required. For this we can thank U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton,... It was instead the judge's decision to make public the testimonials written to the court by members of the Washington establishment pleading that a criminal convicted on four felony counts be set free.
Mr. Libby's lawyers argued that these letters should remain locked away on the hilarious grounds that they might be "discussed, even mocked, by bloggers."
You see-this is the real kicker. Sometimes the Democrats Washington Insider and the Republican Washington Insider are the same animal.
Among those contributing to the 373 pages of what thesmokinggun.com calls "Scooter Libby Love Letters" are self-identified liberals and Democrats, a few journalists (including a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) and a goodly sample of those who presided over the Iraq catastrophe or cheered it on. This is a documentary snapshot of the elite Washington mob of our time.
They tell the judge that he was good to kids around Halloween and he even helped a liberal democrat dig his car out. It’s just a sad tale of how everyone inside the beltway gets transported to another planet. One where law and memory get lost or misplaced.
As the political historian Rick Perlstein has written, one of the recurrent themes of these pleas for mercy is that Mr. Libby perjured himself "only because he was so busy protecting us from Armageddon."
So they couldn’t spin this one. This was a consevative Reagan appointed judge who’s courtroom found Libby guilty of lying under oath and obstructing justice. But this is never the subject of the relief letters.
Hypocrisy is a dish served so often in Washington that the inside the beltway- protect each other establishment take it for granted that every once in a while we’d like something else served up.
Given that Mr. Libby expressed no contrition in court after being convicted, you'd think some of his defenders might step into that moral vacuum to speak for him. But there's been so much lying surrounding this war from the start that everyone is inured to it by now. In Washington, lying no longer registers as an offense against the rule of law.
Instead the letter writers repeat tirelessly that Mr. Libby is a victim, suffering "permanent damage" to his reputation, family and career in the typical judgment of Kenneth Adelman, the foreign-policy thinker who predicted a "cakewalk" for America in Iraq. There's a whole lot of projection going on, because to judge from these letters, those who drummed up this war think of themselves as victims too.
Paul Wolfowitz uses his letter to point the blame at Paul Bremer for this fiasco. Keneth Adelman, who must be so embarrassed by his cakewalk comment that he literally disappeared off the Fox News radar screen and rarely shows his face. Yet, like all the neo-cons, being proved about as wrong as is possible never gets in the way of offering up advice.
Of all the Libby worshipers, the one most mocked in the blogosphere and beyond is Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American academic and war proponent who fantasized that a liberated Iraq would have a (positive) "contagion effect" on the region and that Americans would be greeted "in Baghdad and Basra with kites and boom boxes." (I guess it all depends on your definition of "boom boxes.") ... In Mr. Ajami's view, Tim Russert (whose testimony contradicted Mr. Libby's) and the American system of justice are untrustworthy, and "the 'covertness' of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established." (The C.I.A. confirmed her covert status in court documents filed in May.)
Mr. Ajami, Rich notes, pulls an Alger Hiss (blaming his misfortunes on the Cold War) when he calls the trial a referendum on the war on Iraq.
No wonder Victoria Gotti denigrated "that mob in Washington." When the godfathers of this war speak of never leaving "a fallen comrade" on the battlefield in Iraq, as Mr. Ajami writes of Mr. Libby, they are speaking first and foremost of one another. The soldiers still making the ultimate sacrifice for this gang's hubristic folly will just have to fend for themselves.
Oh, the irony. And the timing.
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