The Village

by digby

I was awfully pleased this morning to see that Dan Froomkin and I are of the same mind when it comes to this silly “Clinton did it, too” defense of Scooters Skate:

[A]s it happens, the previous granting of clemency that is most analogous to what Bush did dates back neither to the Clinton or even the Nixon era, but to Bush’s father’s presidency.In 1992, on the eve of his last Christmas in the White House, George H.W. Bush pardoned former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others for their conduct related to the Iran-Contra affair, in which he himself was also loosely implicated.As David Johnston reported in the New York Times at the time, independent prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh was livid. “Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.'”

Martin Longman suggested when I wrote about this yesterday that I recall the establishment press consensus at the time, just as a sort of exercise. You won’t be surprised that many of them were similar to this, from the Boston Herald:

In exercising his power to lift the taint of illegality from six American patriots – former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams; CIA officers Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George; and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane – Bush showed mercy and wisdom. As he noted, each man acted from love of country, none profited (or even sought to profit) from his actions, and all six have long records of service to the nation.

Meanwhile, the president’s pardons reaffirm some fundamental principles. Among them, that foreign policy in the United States is ultimately the domain of the president. That differences of policy are not crimes. That political disputes should be resolved through politics – i.e., elections – not through prosecutions.

Some of these six men have pleaded guilty to such “crimes” as not turning over their notes of confidential policymaking sessions. Hounded by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, with his unlimited budget and Simon Legree mindset, they knew they faced bankruptcy if they didn’t admit guilt – even though they had done nothing wrong.

Iran-Contra was a flawed policy, not a criminal conspiracy. We hope the president, in pardoning the six, is able, as he put it, “to put bitterness behind us and look to the future.” And we hope Walsh’s fanatic pursuit will finally be stopped.

Sound familiar? Walsh, you’ll remember, was a Republican judge.

And yes, “we put the bitterness behind us and looked to future” — or I should say the Democrats did. The Republicans went on an unprecedented crusade to take the next president down almost immediately by any means necessary. And when the inevitable Republican independent counsel (there were almost never any other kind) was appointed and failed to find that Hillary had killed Vince Foster with her bare hands, they had him removed and replaced with one who was a little bit more reliable and would keep digging until he found something.

But to this day, elite opinion makers in this country continue to maintain that a Republican president cannot be held accountable by the congress for anything because he is trying to guard our country against the boogeyman and shouldn’t be second-guessed. I don’t know why they have absorbed this message so thoroughly — I assume it’s from a quarter century of loud pontificating at GOP social functions — but they have. If a president lies, breaks the law or corrupts the constitution in the name of keeping us safe, you are not going to find many beltway elites who are willing to say he should be stopped. It’s fear of the angry mob, I guess.

The other unsurprising sentiment I found among the punditocrisy regarding Poppy’s Christmas Eve pardons was relief that good old Cap had been spared, even though he was clearly spared to shut him up. Here’s some world weary beltway wisdom from our old pal Richard Cohen in the Wapo’s December 30, 1992 issue, who had his suspicions, but in the end just shrugged his shoulders and moved on:

Back when Caspar Weinberger was secretary of defense, he and I used to meet all the time. Our “meetings” — I choose to call them that — took place in the Georgetown Safeway, the one on Wisconsin Avenue, where I would go to shop and Cap would too. My clear recollection is that once — was it before Thanksgiving? — he bought a turkey.

I tell you this about the man President Bush just pardoned because it always influenced my opinion of Weinberger. (In contrast, I submit the member of the House leadership who had an aide push the cart.) Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense — which is the way much of official Washington saw him. It seemed somehow cruel that he should end his career — he’s 75 — either as a defendant in a criminal case or as a felon. The man deserved better than that.

And so when Weinberger was indicted by Lawrence E. Walsh, the special Iran-contra prosecutor, I despaired. Weinberger had been on the “right” side of the debate within the Reagan administration of whether to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held in Lebanon. He opposed the swap, but he did so in confidence. Clearly, he lost the argument, and he may have lost his good sense when he allegedly withheld evidence. That being said, I was pleased when he was pardoned.

[…]

We now know that Bush kept a diary that, until recently, he withheld from the special prosecutor. My guess is that we will eventually get even more evidence of Bush’s participation in the making of the arms-for-hostages policy but that, ultimately, his role will always be in dispute. That, in a way, is fitting. It conforms to his posture on raising taxes, on abortion, on civil rights and on judicial appointments, the misrepresentation of Clarence Thomas as eminently qualified for the court above all. A kind of haze, a political-ideological miasma, is the fitting legacy of the Bush presidency.

Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me. As for the other five, they are not crooks in the conventional sense but Cold Warriors who, confident in the justice of their cause, were contemptuous of Congress. Because they thought they were right, they did not think they had to be accountable. This is the damage the Cold War did to our democracy.

It was “the Cold War” that did this to our democracy, not the corrupt Republicans who believed a dictatorship would be better, as long as they were the dictators. (Of course, they changed course right quick when they took control of the congress two years later. Suddenly they were the voice of “the people” and the president was irrelevant — a development about which the beltway gasbags were conspicuously silent as they bathed Newtie in a hagiographic glow of Mr Deeds style populism in his early days as speaker.)

But what tipped it for Cohen was that he knew Cap. He bought a turkey. He was one of them. Like Scooter. The Village protects their own.

The Clintons weren’t their own. Neither was Carter. Reagan, of course, was —- why they’d been watching him in the movies for decades. All Americans felt like he was one of their own. (And Nancy was a first lady they could admire, even as she exerted an iron grip on the social life of the village. She was a powerful QueenBee.) Nixon wasn’t one of them — no way. Ford was. The senior Bush’s have been villagers forever —in fact, their son was the village idiot but they accepted him as president as long as there were many respected elders like Dick and Lynn and Don and Scooter keeping an eye on him.

Back in 92 Cohen had informed himself enough of the facts to know that Bush was covering up his crime, but in the end just couldn’t get past that picture of old Cap the lonely old Safeway turkey buyer (which surely pleased the villagers.) He’s fully made the transition to elder now. He might even be a priest: he no longer bothers to look at the facts at all.

Update: E.J. Dionne is able to look beyond the village’s opinion of Scooter, their wonderful neighbor and colleague, and see the commutation for what it really was.

I harbored no personal desire to see I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby spend a long time in prison for his perjury and obstruction-of-justice convictions. People who know him tell me he is a thoughtful and interesting man, and I have no reason to doubt them.Yet when I learned that President Bush had commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence, I was enraged although not surprised. Rage should not be a standard response to political events (though avoiding it has gotten harder in recent years), so I had to ask if my anger was justified. Here’s the case for getting mad and staying mad.

The core point is that “equal justice under law” either means something or it doesn’t. In this case, all the facts we know tell us that Libby received far more than equal justice, as evidenced by the irregular way his commutation was handled.

See? Not so hard. Dan Froomkin can do it too. They prove it’s possible. But you have to be willing to go against the village which probably isn’t easy. In fact, it’s so daunting that it may even be necessary to replace the elders altogether if we are going to fix this mess.

.