Be Proactive
by matt at 12:00 pm on June 5th, 2007 in '06/'08 Campaigns, PlamegateI’ve never, strictly speaking, had a job in politics. So it’s possible that all my criticisms of Democrats with regards to their nearly perfect record of being completely unprepared for dealing with contingencies are unfair. Maybe the dog ate their homework before the Roberts and Alito hearings, causing the two nominees to be defined by their backers rather than their records. Maybe they all had food poisoning (from A&W hamburgers?) around the time that the President vetoed the Iraq supplemental, leading to the embarrassing disarray that saw them lose the initiative and eventually the battle. Hey, sh*t happens, right?
I wonder what their excuse will be when they fail to benefit politically from the President’s inevitable pardon of Scooter Libby. Libby was sentenced today to 30 months in prison and $250,000 in fines. And if you think that the President is going to allow that sentence to be carried out, you’re either suffering from irrational optimism, or you just haven’t been paying attention.
Since Bush is, and has been for some time, a lame duck, the Libby pardon won’t make a lot of difference to him. That the President’s power to pardon is nearly limitless makes political realities their only cost. And for Bush, who famously claimed to have excess political capital just days after winning the 2004 election by ~three percent, political realities clearly don’t apply to him. But there is a passel of morons trying to succeed him, not to mention the rogues gallery of Republicans in Congress facing reelection next year. If Scooter gets to keep his backdoor intact (nullus), then there must be a price.
Will Democrats get their adversaries on record supporting or opposing the pardon, or will they sit around and whine about it? I know which side I’m betting on.
sarabeth wrote:
Shouldn’t they be starting now, saying with one voice that the sentence pronounced today is perfectly meaningless, because Bush will pardon him as soon as he has to actually go to jail?
Shouldn’t we have heard a loud chorus of this already?
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 12:31 pm ¶
matt wrote:
no. this is what they did on the veto. it needs to be phrased like this: the courts have rendered a verdict and pronounced sentence. do you agree that justice has been done and that the guilty party should be subject to the punishment.
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 12:35 pm ¶
matt wrote:
also: RULE OF LAW! repeated ad infinitum.
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 12:36 pm ¶
sac wrote:
It’s not the Dems fault, it’s the media’s fault. They won’t give the Dems the phone numbers of their bookers.
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 12:51 pm ¶
matt wrote:
laugh all you want. if you are still fooling yourself into thinking that this isn’t part of it, i’m not sure what to say other than go read any of the studies on partisan makeup of talk show panels. or don’t, and continue your nonsense.
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 12:53 pm ¶
sarabeth wrote:
What should the objective be?
To try to forestall a pardon?
Or to try and provoke a pardon first, and then milk it for all the political capital it’s worth?
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 3:06 pm ¶
matt wrote:
exact a political cost and use that to dems advantage in 08.
there is no getting around the pardon. bush and cheney would rather walk away than allow someone to do jail time/pay a fine for (as they see it) doing their job.
i’d like to see libby do the time and be in hock for a while, but let’s face it: it would be more fitting if it was rove and cheney. so the pardon doesn’t bother me as much as missing an opportunity to capitalize on it.
Posted 05 Jun 2007 at 3:12 pm ¶