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THERE was never
any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man
who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only
questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we
have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself. They
reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true
character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer
camouflage his fundamental cowardice.
The timing of
the president’s Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic
the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father’s pardon of six
Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill
Clinton’s pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major
campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr.
Libby.
But the
ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled
eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic
that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the
immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his
strategy in Iraq.
That Mr. Bush,
already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit
has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his
base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn’t care if he looked
like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and
violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration.
He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O’Reilly
in a bunker.
But if those
die-hards haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be
the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox
News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless
and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no
right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or
“amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
The only people
clamoring for Mr. Libby’s freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam
secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby
might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for
war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the
past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks
like the American Enterprise Institute.
What this crowd
never understood is that Mr. Bush’s highest priority is always to protect
himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly
Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a
commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the
beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney’s use of prewar
intelligence.
Valerie Wilson
still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry
Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda
as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr.
Libby’s appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He
can’t testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to
believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of
his private $5 million “legal defense fund.”
The president’s
presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really
believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted
Mr. Libby’s jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday
without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That’s the behavior of an
accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a
patriot standing on principle.
When the furor
followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck
it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on
the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know
this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This
instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to
trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as
merely “some bureaucratic red-tape issues.”
Asked last week
to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center
told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind”
to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so
evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to
understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and
hubris.
Even The Wall
Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to
take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon
(at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile
in non-courage.”
What it did not
recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The
Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the
“wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr.
Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his
leadership than anything else.
People don’t
change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was
apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet
kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the
White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then
and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby
commutation.
The first fight
he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt
federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say
so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal
research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but
11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional
amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden
announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from
the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.
Nowhere is this
president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston
Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed
the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.”
Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the
press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the
Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged
unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban
on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal)
responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.
In the end, it
was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the
Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime
footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft
if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources
needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.
But he never
backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the
war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium
claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libby’s obstructions of justice.
Mr. Bush’s cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime
leadership ratified Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to go into Iraq with the army he
had, ensuring our defeat.
Never
underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory
aspects of Mr. Bush’s commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of
“Bring ’em on” to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president
responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission
Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush
assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security
situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary
four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as
disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure
that force.
No one can stop
Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only
those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the
moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush. |
