I can appreciate the fact that Scooter Libby’s conservative friends don’t mind his outrageous conduct, and are even willing to help raise money for his legal defense, but there should at least be limits on how ridiculous they’re willing to be with their praise for a man who was forced to resign in disgrace.<\/p>\n
Mary Matalin, for example, sent a fundraising letter on behalf of Libby’s Legal Defense Trust in which she tells the reader, “This loyal soldier in the War on Terror doesn’t have to go at it alone.”<\/p>\n
“Loyal”? “Soldier”? Please. Thankfully, Nico set the record straight<\/a>.<\/p>\n Scooter Libby knowingly exposed the cover of a CIA operative. He did it to exact political revenge<\/a> on Joseph Wilson, who had revealed that intelligence was “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” The damage from the leak was serious enough to warrant a CIA investigation<\/a>. Arthur Brown, a CIA division chief who retired in 1995, described Libby’s action as the “moral equivalent to exposing forward deployed military units<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Libby is no “soldier,” let alone a “loyal soldier.” A different label for him was offered by President George H. W. Bush: “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors<\/a>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Matalin is clearly no longer capable of shame, but this fundraising pitch should be humiliating. If Libby is a “loyal soldier in the War on Terror,” Dick Cheney is a competent public official with a healthy respect for the limits of our constitutional system of government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can appreciate the fact that Scooter Libby’s conservative friends don’t mind his outrageous conduct, and are even willing to help raise money for his legal defense, but there should at least be limits on how ridiculous they’re willing to be with their praise for a man who was forced to resign in disgrace. Mary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}