I was really surprised to hear that some black people were saying that racism was driving the charges against Michael Vick. But the charge of racism no longer became an issue once I learned that there were some people - both black and white - who were actually defending Vick’s actions. I was puzzled. How on earth could anyone defend such barbaric behavior? Then, I realized, it happens all the time.
I thought back to President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence. I had similar thoughts back then. It was bad enough that the President could excuse such anti-American behavior, but when a number of Libby supporters jumped on the bandwagon, it was like watching people who had abandoned any sense of ethics.
The same moral compass that sees dog-fighting as brutal, should also be able to see that obstructing justice, lying to the FBI, and committing two counts of perjury is depraved. The same moral compass that recoils in horror at the electrocution of dogs, should also recoil in horror at a traitor who covers up an investigation into the intentional outing of a CIA agent. The same moral compass that condemns the drowning of dogs should also condemn a coward who protects those who have put many of our intelligence agents’ lives at risk.
At least Michael Vick has pled guilty to some of the charges against him. Scooter Libby is still unrepentant. Remarkably, even Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson is part of the Libby Legal Defense Trust Advisory Committee. Someday, someone will have to explain to me how anyone can take Mr. Law & Order seriously when he holds such an anti-law and anti-order soft-on-crime position. I’ve heard him parrot the silly Republican talking points defending Libby: “Oh, Libby just had a faulty memory.” Reality check: has your memory ever forgotten nine separate conversations with eight individuals over a four-week period and then completely fabricated two conversations out of whole cloth that never happened? There’s a reason the jury found him guilty on four counts.
People forget what the CIA Leak investigation was about: It was about the Bush administration being called on the carpet for lying the country into the war in Iraq. When Joe Wilson exposed what they did, they didn’t attack the content of his charge. Instead, they retaliated mercilessly by outing his CIA wife and her entire CIA front company, Brewster Jennings, which was doing undercover work on WMDs in Iraq and Iran, putting all of those agents’ lives in jeopardy and seriously impeding our intelligence operations. I'm astonished that there are still a handful of people out there who claim that Valerie Plame was not covert when she was outed, despite the fact that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald showed eight ways to Sunday that she was indeed covert. Libby and Thompson, without conscience, all but wink at an administration whose lies about Iraq have sent thousands of American soldiers to their deaths while Vick has admitted complicity in the torture of dogs. Which is worse?
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