Scooter And Sandy

Sandy Berger steals national secrets and gets a $50,000 fine and no felony conviction. Scooter Libby misremembers a conversation and gets a felony conviction and $250,000 fine.

Ace has the winning idea:

Suggestion: Bush should have reduced the fine to a more reasonable $50,000, which just so happens to be how much Sandy Berger was fined for stealing and destroying classified documents and lying about it to investigators (he wasn’t charged for the latter, but subsequent revelations has made it clear he did just that).

Making the fine $50,000 would have been more in line with Libby’s transgressions, and it would have made it harder for Democrats to argue against it. The penalty — no jail time, $50,000, probation — would have been so similar to Berger’s that one could scarcely mention it without also mentioning Berger.

It not too late The president can still commute $200,000 of Libby’s fine.

Addendum I: Call it irresistible impulse. Today I have blogged about Scooter, Sandy, Sanity and physicians. So I might as well check in with Dr. Sanity:

Of the two, Berger was clearly the one who deserved jail time, and who was willing to compromise national security to protect himself and his buddy Clinton. Libby was not even the person who “outed” a supposedly covert Plame–in what has to have been the most over-rated and politically motivated revenge lynching in history; he was only the human sacrifice the left demanded to assure themselves that the Bush Administration was at least as corrupt as the Clinton/Gore era and thus their ideology could remain pure.

Say what you will about Scooter Libby, he is no terrorist.

Addendum II: (Bit) It was nearly amusing this morning, watching Lanny Davis on Fox this morning complaining about a “Double Standard”, given the activities of Sandy Berger and his boss.

In the ultimate sense, however, I think what we have here is both sides of the aisle playing to their base over this.  The points that DavidL raises here, along with the far more substantial lies of Bill Clinton, while under oath, and it seems clear to me that the complaints of the Republicans have far more validity.

That having been established, let’s consider the pardons handed out by the Clinton administration at the end of his second term.  I mean, if we’re going to talk about double standards, perhaps we ought to have those in the list under discussion.

It’s pretty much as I said yesterday  Libby was convicted based on an investigation of an action that turned to not even be a crime.  What we have here, is Democrats extracting a pound of flesh for political purposes.  Nothing more .

edit(David)
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