Perjury: outrage vs. its absence
I guess it is hard to take perjury too seriously these days after Bill Clinton lied under oath with no consequences. There are already lefties screaming for Bush’s head because perjury is so bad; lefties that remain strangely silent on Clinton and his lie. Oh, but somehow what Clinton did will be different to them. Somehow, it was okay for Clinton to lie.
And check out some of the pardon’s Clinton granted - bank embezzlement, larceny, obstruction of justice, importation of cocaine, bank robbery, mail fraud, conspiracy to damage property by means and use of an explosive, and many more.
The point: if you are outraged at Bush’s pardon of a perjurer than you had better be outraged at both Clintons escape from the consequences of his own perjury and Clinton’s pardoning of drug dealers, bank robbers, and domestic terrorists.
July 4th, 2007 at 6:00 am
First, Bush did not pardon Libby. (At least not yet.) He commuted his prison sentence.
Second, it is totally false to say that Clinton “lied under oath with no consequences.” In fact he became only the second U. S. president to be impeached, and perjury and obstruction of justice were the reasons. Then in 1999 he was fined by a Federal District Judge $90,000 for contempt of court for failure to testify truthfully concerning the Paula Jones affair. Also his law licence was also suspended for a number of years because of his conduct. Hardly “no consequences.”
That aside, certainly President Bush acted within his powers in commuting the Libby sentence. However, what strikes me as hypocritical on his part is that he found the thirty month prison sentence for this Bush & Co. crony “excessive”, while he continues his Guantanamo Bay detainee fiasco, where only about 10% of nearly 800 suspects are facing trial. How “excessive” is it to imprison people indefinitely without charging them with a crime?