Today attorney Robert F. Bauer, counsel for the Obama campaign, comes out with what he calls a “progressive case for a Libby pardon.” In a nutshell, Bauer’s blog illustrates why Democrats running for office should not recycle ‘Democratic’ advisors left over from ‘centrist’ losing campaigns. Bauer worked for Bill Bradley, one of the authors of the so-called ‘tax reform’ of the Eighties that began the mighty work of shifting our national tax burden from the wealthy and corporations to the middle class.

The important point here is that Bauer’s silly machiavellianism – that a Libby pardon will get Bush into more trouble and therefore we should want it – is ethically wrong.

But it is also false on its own terms. Here follow some of the misstatements, overstatements or misdirection, with concise response:

“Until a very short while ago, few had heard of Scooter Libby.”

-         That’s true. It took investigation by government agencies, the work of two grand juries, and a trial and conviction to bring Mr. Libby’s acts and omissions before the public.

“Today, still not a celebrity with the larger public, he carries on his shoulders the full weight of charges against the administration in the Wilson/Plame matter.”

 - Mr. Bauer hammers the neocon talking point that Mr. Libby was the only person indicted. This talking point omits, typically, that 1) More investigation and disclosure – transparency and accountability – would illuminate more of the related actions of other civil officers, as the Constitution calls them. And 2) Libby’s actions, as a largely Republican jury overwhelmingly agreed, obstructed the investigation.

“Convicted of lying, he is not really reviled for that.”

 - Well, actually, people do criticize the lying.

“To Bush's antagonists on left, a pardon would be only another act in the conspiracy -- a further cover-up, a way of getting away with it. But this is the entirely wrong way of seeing things. A pardon is just what Bush's opponents should want.”

 - Actually, a pardon – as with Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich – would be a continued cover-up and would let the convicted defendant get away with it. I am intrigued that an attorney wrote this. No attorney genuinely believes that you can’t prosecute one perpetrator because you didn’t catch them all.

“A pardon brings the president into the heart of the case. It compels him to do what he has so far managed to avoid: accept in some way responsibility for the conduct of his Administration in communicating with the public about national security and in its treatment of dissent.”

 - Utter nonsense. If Libby gets off, the justice system loses. This president seldom to never answers questions. He barely answers questions about Iraq. Bauer’s thesis here also leaves out Cheney, who tends to answer even fewer questions than does the White House.

“The case against this government on the larger charge of abuse of power is diminished, made even laughable, by resolving into a 30-month sentence for an obscure figure named Libby.”

 - Actually, the larger charge of abuse of power is substantiated by the legal process.

“So Bush kept clear of the case . . . And the case that unfolded, in the natural course, offered additional benefits to his administration, more consequential in the long run than the sniping at Plame and Wilson. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald, doing the job he was assigned, chased resolutely and relentlessly every bit of evidence from any source. It took him to the press, and there he made an enduring mark, squeezing prominent journalists and dispatching to jail the one who held out longer than the others. A government in war-time, criticized for hounding dissenters and for hostility to dissent, could enjoy the spectacle of a national security investigation and prosecution fully compatible with those aims. And this advance in the weaponry available to the National Security State is one that the administration could point to as proof of its commitment to the rule of law.”

-         I am opposed to the National Security State with everything in me, and my country is part of me. But the “squeezing prominent journalists” in this matter was never a First Amendment saga of pressuring a reporter to reveal a source for a story. Judith Miller, “the one who held out longer than the others,” did indeed go to jail – but evidently not for Libby. And she wasn’t working on a story. Her legal claim was that she was entitled to a journalistic privilege of confidentiality just for being a journalist. This is like a priest’s claiming the privilege of the confessional for a confession of murder shared with him while waiting for a bus.

-         Furthermore, Miller et al. were not protecting a source. They were protecting the administration from the public, by withholding the information 1) that the administration was trying to plant, 2) by whom, about whom, and to whom, and 3) that the administration was engaging in this tactic in the first place.

“A presidential pardon is finally an intervention by the President, his emergence from behind the thick curtain . . . Now the president, the true party in interest, would confront them, which is what his opponents have demanded all along.”

 - Sure, and pigs may be taking wing at this very moment.

“[Libby] will just be the Fall Guy, the minor actor in a play that, if Bush never takes the stage with a pardon, closes soon to disappointing reviews.”

 - Actually, officers of the court could make the “reviews” less “disappointing” by clueing the public in on what actually happened, rather than lending their talents to the war-boosting noise machine.