Scooter Libby’s Life is Destroyed, Folks

RUSH: This is an e-mailer. This is a subscriber to RushLimbaugh.com objecting, or questioning my assessment of Scooter Libby’s life has just been destroyed.
?Dear Rush: Scooter Libby’s life destroyed? This is a temporary setback! Ollie North came out pretty good after he got the goat tag. Libby will get a good gig at Fox News Channel. He’ll be the go-to expert on inside the administration. True, this is a BS deal, but I think Scooter will be all right.?
This is precisely my point. We look at all of this because we’re not personally involved, and we look at it in almost a cavalier way — and in a way that simply examines the “process.” Scooter Libby has just been convicted of a felony, four felonies! Scooter Libby, in the eyes of the law, is no more than a common, human debris-shred defendant. Look at how he’s being tarred and feathered. I know the Drive-By Media is now starting to come up with some sympathy for him, blah, blah, blah, blah, as I also predicted yesterday. But in the eyes of the law this guy is every bit the criminal than anybody else.
Four felonies! If you don’t think that Scooter Libby and his wife didn’t sleep last night, if you don’t think that his family is upset…? Do you think Scooter Libby grew up, the kind of guy he is, ever thinking he would run afoul of the law in this way? I guarantee you he didn’t. This is not part of the game. Somebody says, ?Well, I’ll work for you Mr. Cheney and I’ll even go to jail. I’ll even be convicted.? This is not what these people planned for. You get rung up by the federal government and you get a prosecutor with unlimited power pursuing you! You try it, folks. You see what it’s like.
To sit there and say, “Oh, Scooter will be fine. He’ll be on Fox News Channel”!
Even if Scooter Libby is pardoned, he is going to have a cloud over his head for the rest of his life precisely because of that. There is no good way out of this. Yeah, there are some. He may not serve jail time. If he does, he may not serve much, but we’re still talking about a very real possibility the guy is going to go to jail. How many of you would sign up for that? My only point here is, this is a real person, and this guy is on our side — and he has been convicted of felonies because he’s a Republican and because he was defending the policies of an administration that the majority of the people in this country voted for!
He was defending this administration against a pack of lies told by a psychopath and his wife. ?Scooter will be okay. You’re overdoing this. He’ll be on Fox News Channel doing analysis.? Yip, yip, yahoo! If Scooter Libby wanted to be on Fox News Channel, he would have gone into journalism! If Scooter Libby wanted to be on Fox News Channel telling the truth about whatever he’s an expert in, he would have signed up for that. That’s not what Scooter Libby set out to do, and I’m not sure so sure he will end up on the Fox News. I’m not sure it?s something he wants. As I say, I don’t know him.
But the fact that so many people look at this in an impersonal way and just chalk it up to, ?Well, that’s Washington,? that’s part of the problem. If this is just Washington, then something about Washington is poisoned and needs to be fixed. Guys like Libby and Cheney and Rumsfeld, et al, Condoleezza Rice, have been working tirelessly in a yeoman effort to battle the fact that the left is trying to take over this country institution by institution by institution, insulating themselves from election results, so that even when Democrats lose, they still run these institutions. You think it’s no big deal to be a convicted felon?
Put yourself in his shoes. I know it’s hard to do if you haven’t been pursued by law enforcement, particularly the feds. But do you think this is going to be fine? Do you think Scooter Libby had the money to pay off these lawyers? Do you think he has the money to pay off the lawyers for these appeals, when he has to go out there and do fund-raisers and so forth? You think Scooter Libby is going to earn $40 million in the lecture circuit in six years like Bill Clinton did? It frosts me here, folks, because this is one of our guys, a human being who’s been railroaded by a judicial system that’s designed to protect against this very thing happening.
It’s absurd! It is an outrage! It is an injustice — and he’s not going to be “okay.”
He’ll get through it and he’ll be looking back at this portion of his life at some point obviously, but if he gets the right kind of people around him, he’ll be able to keep this in perspective and build on it and so forth. In one sense, if you want to say it will be okay, I understand what you mean, but this is not a win! This is not one of these things that’s a building block to other great things, unless it’s played properly. But even if he’s pardoned, there’s that cloud over you when you get pardoned, because when you get pardoned — and I guarantee, the Bush administration is not going to pardon him any time soon. They’re going to wait for the appellate process.
The last thing they want to do is pardon him, particularly now. Bush still has to govern for a year and a half! He has a lot of things on his plate. This appeal process is going to take another year, so there?s not going to be a pardon before that. I can’t imagine that there would be, because the best of both worlds here is for the appeal to be granted and Libby to win it, and then we’re in good shape. But if the appeal is granted and — or if it’s not. If it’s not granted or if it is granted and he loses, then the soonest there would be a pardon would be December of 2008 when Congress leaves and nothing can be done about it as far as hearings and so forth, and that’s traditionally when presidents issue pardons, the bulk of them. Bush has already issued some during the course of his administration, but even so, the pardon says you did it but the president let you off the hook. You still did it, and still have a cloud. It’s wiped clean, but you were convicted of four felonies.