Aw Keef. You blew a perfectly good chance to start a family with the abandoned casino baby your dad was offering. And how cool is it that "your" kid would already have a tattoo?

(Great strip.)

Frum is right, but not in the way he thinks he is. It is unfair that Libby alone is facing jail time, when it is abundantly clear that at least the vice president should be in the same position.

And if we look further afield than just the Plame outing case, it's also unfair that Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the crew that lied us into war, lied about the war itself, that engaged in unconstitutional acts of torture, rendition, spying on citizens, etc. are also not facing prison time.

So, yes, it is monumentally unfair that Libby is facing jail time...all by himself. He's in bad company that ought to be sharing his fate.

I agree with Calmer and just want to add that actions by the Republican Congress, which were in essentially in lockstep with the Bush administration before the 2006 elections drove non-Republicans to the conclusion that if there were shades of gray in the Republican party, there was precious little loyal dissent internally and that the various groups within the party were willing to swallow their principles for the sake of power.

If you want others to see the shades of gray you need to have the guts to make them evident.

Although I am not religious, I pray this is a first and important step to restoring the rule of law in the United States, complete with the essential constitutional protections that serve as the foundation of our system of justice.

The fear that gripped a significant part of our population (aided and abetted by the propaganda of the Bush Administration) created the conditions for granting Bush so much unconstitutional power over the detention of both foreign and American citizens. If the Fourth Circuit is calling out the Congress and Executive on their post-9/11 changes in American law, I have some hope that we will work our way back to sanity and decency. I just hope that sometime in the near future, we also find it in ourselves to apologize to and compensate all those who have been incorrrectly detained without legal recourse to defend themselves. Decency demands nothing less.

For those of you who would like to read the full, disgraceful statement of commutation, it's available here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/02/AR2007070201463.html?hpid=topnews.

It reads as badly as the decision itself, claiming that all of the issues have been seriously considered and that the punishment is excessive, even though Libby was afforded excellent council and the full rights and priviledges of our judicial system before the sentence was rendered.

Great strip! It put me in mind of Major Major Major Major in

"Catch-22". He instructed his secretary to tell visitors to his office he was in when he was out and out when he was in.

"If Sara Taylor's testimony is honest, open, and frank..."

-futhark-

That is the crux of the matter. My first reaction to this story, assuming it is correct, was, "Sure. She'll show up, but she'll either suffer from severe memory problems like so many others in the administration, or she'll just keep invoking the fifth amendment. Sorry to be so cynical, but I'll bet the hearings will be a big non-event as far as honest, open and frank are concerned.

What I find most interesting about the projected outcome from the war games, is that Iraq ends up with a defacto partition of the country into Kurdish, Sunni and Shia regions. In other words, what our presence in Iraq is now really doing is preventing the partitioning of the country into its major ethic factions, something that the West has been trying to forestall since the British left and created Iraq in the first part of the 20th century. For all Sadaam's nastiness, his dictatorship was the only thing, prior to our meddling, holding Iraq together.

Now we have unleashed those historical forces and stand no chance of stopping them unless we're willing to commit to a multigenerational occupation of Iraq, a la the Soviet Union post World War II. (I've always thought that in some perverse sense, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was just a bit too short because it probably would have taken another generation or so for folks to "forget" the ethnic hatreds that drove the wars in Bosnia, etc.)

A 70 or more year occupation of Iraq is clearly not something that the American people signed onto when Bush started this war, whether they supported it from the outset or not. So what will it be? An orderly withdrawal of our troops accompanied by an international effort to keep a lid on the fighting and to broker agreements between Sunni, Shia and Kurd? Or an indefinite occupation waiting for Iraqis that see themselves as members of a common state rather than particular ethnic groups?