Just for the record, I only ever opened my yap about Scooter Libby because I found Andrew Sullivan's original take to be both ludicrous and hysterical. Now comes his clarification, responding to what my friend Jamie Kirchik wrote at TNR's The Plank (full disclosure: Jamie linked to my post "The Scooter Chronicles"):
I do not believe, as Jamie Kirchick asserts, that the commutation of Libby's sentence for perjury is a sign of creeping authoritarianism. I've said it's constitutional, but indefensible. My concern with authoritarianism is related to the Bush administration's claims that it has the right to detain any American or non-American anywhere in the world, detain them indefinitely without charges and torture them, if deemed necessary to national security; it is related to the use of signing statements that exempt the president from enforcing the laws; to wire-tapping Americans with no court oversight; and to the suspension of habeas corpus. I know Jamie seems utterly unconcerned by any of these things – and for good reason. We now know that neocons need not fear the justice system. They have a president who will exempt his ideological supporters from the rule of law.
Leaving aside for a minute how fast Jamie would find himself out of prison stripes by the grace of neoconservative infallibility, Andrew's elaboration hardly meshes with what he originally wrote in response to the commutation news, which was this:
"It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law – except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn't know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served. And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security."
"Contemptuous of the rule of law," followed by a comparison to absolute monarchy… And we're to believe this was not uttered as a warning sign of "creeping authoritarianism" in Washington?
One of the more absurd gotchas in the aftermath of this affair has been to point out that a Republican Justice Department indicted, tried, and sentenced Libby, so clearly he must have done something really bad to command such categorical evidence against interest. Yet if a Republican president chooses to contradict his own judicial appointees or co-partisan prosecutors, how is this a sign, in itself, of ideological venality? Moreover, why are there so many registered Democrats lobbying on Libby's behalf, and for no other reason than they believe his prosecution was unlawful from the start?
Not that it should matter or that I should have to clear my throat with this, but I am with Andrew up to the hilt in opposing the Bush administration's policy of torture and domestic espionage and suspension of habeas corpus. But I remember when the kind of Burkean conservatism his Bloggy Lordship otherwise extols meant intellectual honesty and a careful use of language, not this silly promiscuity with semantics, evidently undone with the work of a keystroke.
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