After Libby Trial

By Adam Liptak - March 8th, 2007 - New York Times

After Libby Trial, New Era for Government and Press

The investigation and trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, will have many legacies and lessons — for government officials, for supporters and critics of special prosecutors and for historians of the events leading to the war in Iraq.

But the institution most transformed by the prosecution, and the one that took the most collateral damage from Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s relentless pursuit of obstruction and perjury charges against Mr. Libby, may have been the press, forced in the end to play a major role in his trial.

What the public needs to learn is the real lesson of this trial, taught by liberal Tim Russert (a hardcore democrat partisan), not the lessons the commiecrat newspaper the New York Times thinks is the lesson they were taught. Russert was perfectly willing to share all he knew that would damage the President and the Republican Party, as long as it was him "privately" chatting with the attorneys for the justice department. At the very same time he was voluably chatting with the justice department off the record he was fighting a supoena to have to say the same thing on the record, and lying in the process. Nothing of greater importance to Republicans could have come out of this fiasco. Maybe the weenie wing of the Republican Party will start to understand how viciously the media really plays this hypocritical game.

This has long been the real game played by the MSM (main stream media). A duplicitous game where anything that hurts Republicans is privately conveyed at the same time that anything that hurts any democrat or socialist is fought with a vengeance, publicly and privately.

Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury on the basis of the fact that he remembered a conversation differently than Tim Russert, or at least as the partisan bigot Tim Russert claims he remembers it. The reality is that Tim Russert lied in his court filings. He claimed that he never revealed what sources said when the justice department has taped telephone conversations with Russert telling them off the record exactly what he claimed he would never reveal.

The jury believes him more than they believe Libby?

George W. Bush started this whole fiasco when he insisted that he would fire anyone who did not cooperate fully with the investigation. What should have happened is that there should have been wholesale resignations by his entire staff for Bush's gutless caving to political pressure. If you have any doubt about George W. Bush's culpability in this fiasco, check out this second article in the American Thinker, Get a Grip Mr. President, by J. Peter Mulhern.

This trial has set a new standard. It has escalated the war between Republicans and democrats to a new level of ruthlessness. Next time we have the chance, any democrat who is being pursued should be persecuted with this same vigor. Reporters must be jailed if they do not willingly reveal their sources and all they said. If democrats want war Republicans must fight too. Everyone must play by the same rules.

See you in the streets.