Libby, égalité, fraternité

The president's friends are above the law, and his policies are beneath contempt.

by David Faris

Last week, the Bush administration deflected public attention away from a rare foreign policy accomplishment in North Korea with another revelation of the corrupt lawlessness at the heart of this presidency.

Instead of talking about the breakthrough with North Korea, the chattering classes are atwitter about the commutation of Scooter Libby's 30-month prison sentence. Bush spent more time thinking about leniency for Libby in the past few weeks than he did for all of the death row inmates whose execution warrants he signed as governor of Texas.

After six years of cynically manipulating information, lying and undermining the Constitution, Bush did what he has always done best: the wrong thing at the wrong time. Sixty percent of Americans � traitorous extremists in the eyes of the Right � believe that Libby should have served his perfectly reasonable sentence. And Bush probably could've avoided a lot of the heat here if he had let his buddy have just a little taste of the posh, minimum-security slammer to which he was surely headed rather than confirming the suspicion that Bush and his friends are above the law.

But this guy has turned into a poorer strategic tactician than Alfred von Schlieffen, the German architect of a failed war plan that helped plunge Europe into 30 years of decline. In other words, he's another guy with whom Bush should have some instinctive sympathy.

Another evildoer of great disrepute received a stay of his own recently when the Bush administration caved and agreed to give the North Koreans their mafia money and some fuel in return for shutting down the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon that helped produce the nuclear weapon exploded by the Hermit Kingdom in October. The deal, though � originally agreed to in February � had fared badly. Apparently no one wanted to launder Kim Jong-Il's money for him because they might run afoul of U.S. laws.

But some minor differences were resolved, largely because the North Korean file seems to have been moved to the adults at the State Department and away from the screaming zealots in the upper reaches of the administration. We have probably not seen the last confrontation with North Korea, but diplomacy is a much better route than finger-wagging and bad David Frum speeches.

Prior to now, the Bush administration's up-is-down strategic response to a nuclear North Korea was to announce plans to deploy a missile defense system that does not work in the Czech Republic and Poland to defend against a threat from Iran, which currently possesses neither the nuclear weapons nor the missiles to menace their ancient East European enemies. But fearful of the timeless feud between the Poles and the Persians, who have never shared a border, let alone a disagreement, the Bush administration pushed boldly ahead.

A longtime specialist in the manufacturing of needless international crises, Bush cooked up another Crock Pot full of steaming rancor with the missile plan � Russia is now talking about stationing missiles aimed at Europe near Lithuania and Poland. Not since the early 1980s, and the controversy over Ronald Reagan's deployment of Pershing II missiles, has the international community seen such a row over nuclear weapons in Europe.

So Bush, who always imagined himself the new-and-improved Gipper, has relations with the Russians that are just as bad as when Ronnie announced his Star Wars laser plan in 1983. Maybe Bush should look into Putin's soul again and figure out if there's a rapprochement behind his cold blue eyes.

Say what you will about Reagan, but at least the guy had something between the ears. You can bet that no one is going to be releasing George W. Bush's notes and speeches 20 years from now. The only things likely to be released are Bush's friends and advisers from prison � if he hasn't pardoned them first.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.