Here is an interesting point of view by David Corn of the Nation.
Now comes the fall out.

It’s appropriate.

The president who led the nation into a disastrous war in Iraq by peddling false statements and misrepresentations has come to the rescue of a White House aide convicted of lying.

Before the ink was dry on today’s court order denying Scooter Libby’s latest appeal — a motion to allow him to stay out of jail while he was challenging his conviction — George W. Bush commuted Libby’s sentence. Libby will no longer have to serve the 30-month prison sentence ordered by federal district court Judge Reggie Walton. He will, though, have to pay the $250,000 fine that was part of the sentence.

The commutation — which is not a pardon and does not erase Libby’s conviction — is a reminder that Bush and his crew do not believe in accountability. Bush has been rather stingy in the use of his pardon power. And regulations issued by his Justice Department note that recipients of pardons should serve their sentences and demonstrate contrition before obtaining presidential absolution. (Libby had expressed no remorse and was not scheduled to report to jail for several weeks.)

Yet with this commutation, Bush ducked those requirements, and he is allowing Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, who was found guilty of lying to federal investigators in the CIA leak case, to go unpunished. The fine will be no problem for Libby. His neoconservative friends and admirers will kick in to cover that tab. (Perhaps even Cheney will send a check.)

Libby had become a symbol of the Bush White House’s problem with the truth. After all, his lies had been designed to block FBI agents and federal prosecutors from learning the full truth of a White House effort to discredit a critic who had accused the Bush administration of twisting the prewar intelligence. And now the final act in the long-running CIA leak scandal — Bush’s commutation — stands as another symbol of this grand theme: lying doesn’t really bother this crowd.

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