There are, of course, many advantages of not being a lawyer (including, for example, being able to laugh at lawyer jokes, or being able to sleep at night). Another advantage is being able to put on a little girl voice, and ask amazingly naïve questions about basic legal issues.

What I have on my mind, of course, is the Scooter Libby trial. Specifically the basic defense: that Libby is not guilty of perjury because he did not lie; when he “told investigators he learned about Plame’s identity during a telephone call on July 10, 2003, with NBC’s Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert” he just “did not remember other conversations he had with reporters about Plame”.

(Forget, for the moment, the part where they tell us he forgot because of his “crushing workload on national security matters”. You know, all the work that went into making up tall tales about WMDs, and about al Qaeda’s connections to Saddam Hussein, and then putting them out through people like Judy Miller, and having Dick Cheney propagate them at every opportunity. We may – or may not – come back to that later. Not in this post, but some other time.)

We have laws against perjury for a reason, right? If a jury accepts a defense like this, haven’t they just totally gutted those laws? Can anyone ever be convicted of perjury again?

So can someone explain to me how a defense like that can be entertained at all? (Or is Libby’s secret defense going to surface only later: that he suffered totally inadequate representation by criminally incompetent lawyers?)

While we are on the subject of Libby’s trial, can anyone explain to me how an alleged news program like Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room managed to get through its 7 pm Eastern broadcast without one single reference to Judith Miller’s testimony, and the sudden halt the trial came to over issues of confidentiality of news sources?

And is it just me, or does Judy’s style and body language when answering questions make her a soul sister to Condi Rice?

Who did I just insult there, Judy or Condi?

The last sentence of the WaPo story I’ve been quoting from says of Judy: “She retired from the Times that November.” Why don’t they have the balls to say: “She ‘retired’ from the Times that November”?