Still At It

This is just too funny. Alito's family poses for a picture, and his young daughter is getting touched inappropriately by the Clinton portrait! Not only that, he has his other hand in his pocket. When will this guy stop? I know, I know, he can always invoke the famous Gloria Steinem defense, offered after Katherine Willey left the oval office visibly upset with shirt untucked - the President is permitted one grope, and maybe even a little slap and tickle if the first grope is not met with a smack. It might behoove Alito's daughter to return to the White House and give the portrait a solid hit, otherwise any future trial would just have Clinton arguing she was clearly looking for a good time. Unless she's actually looking for an internship which will offer her lots of experience.

Meanwhile I read in the paper yesterday that Clinton just gave a speech bemoaning the fact that the press lets politicians get away with lies. He was saying that in the context of criticizing the press for giving politicians the opportunity to lie by trying to present 2 sides to every story, and giving them the opportunity to comment. My guess is that he's not too concerned with the lies of his own party, so that in effect he is advocating ignoring Republicans in any story. The speech is rich in so many ironies, I wouldn't even know where to start in commenting, except to say that the comments, coming from him, are even funnier than the picture.

Which brings us full circle to the perjury and obstruction charges against Libby. Why wasn't he charged with illegally revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent? When you think about, any guilty person who pleads innocent is straight off guilty of perjury in one sense. In the case of Libby, how come the perjury charge is not directly followed by a charge for the crime that was the subject of the investigation? In this case, the two appear to be directly linked, whereas with Clinton, he perjured himself in such a way that he told the truth, it would not have established he was guilty of sexually harrassing Paula Jones. If Libby's lie was "I did not reveal the identity of a CIA agent," then establishing that is a lie establishes that he revealed the identity of a CIA agent. I find it all quite confusing.

My bet - he gets off. The grand jury that indicted him was comprised of a majority of black women living in DC. My guess is that in the context of a criminal defense, Libby's lawyers will arrive at a very different jury. I'm not saying anything racist here - only that the average black woman in DC is as about as anti-Republican as you can be. But at the end of the day, guilty or innocent, those who want to believe the administration is corrupt will go on believing it, the only difference being the size of the conspiratorial tale they must conjure. If he's guilty, he's the fall guy for what surely involved Bush and Cheney. If he's innocent, not only was he the fall guy, but someone "got to" Fitzgerald, the jury, or both.