I spent eight years wishing the Dick Cheney had been president
rather than George W. Bush. Here's another example where Cheney
was right and Bush was dead wrong:
Cheney really fought to get Bush to pardon Scooter Libby.
Libby wasn't guilty of perjury. At worst, he had a bad memory.
But based on Tim Russert's own flagrant "memory lapses," there is
every reason to believe that it was Russert's memory, not
Libby's, that was faulty. Either way, Liby deserved a pardon.
Bush didn't want to take the heat for such a pardon. Either that,
or else his refusal to pardon was a passive-aggressive move to
punish Cheney's team for supposedly embarrassing Bush or at least
causing unwanted controversy one too many times. Shame on Bush.
Cheney was far more loyal to Bush than Bush was to Cheney. I sat
in on two private lunches (about ten people at each lunch) with
Cheney that had plenty of chances for off-the-record comments and
at which Cheney was pressed, even off the record, to put some
distance between himself and Bush -- but Cheney wouldn't do so.
On the record, two weeks before the end of the Bush
administration, I asked Cheney directly what he thought about
whether Libby should be pardoned. Even then, as he privately was
pressing Bush to do so, he was circumspect, saying that he had a
very high admiration for Libby. Then silence. Pressed, he would
NOT go farther, would NOT be disloyal to Bush by publicly giving
journalists sympathetic to Libby any fodder with which to further
pressure Bush for a pardon.
Cheney is a good man who surrounded himself with strong people.
Bush is a man who liked to be surrounded with sycophants. The
result of the latter was that Bush was one of the most
unsuccessful presidents in decades. The refusal to pardon Libby
is symptomatic of a larger illness: Bush's inability to
reconsider original decisions.
Bush's failure to issue the pardon was a disgrace.
