1 Boring Old Man

I remember when I was in the Air Force, I had to fill out performance reviews on the corpsmen in our clinic. They were wonderful guys, and I gave them the highest of ratings. So, when the hospital commander called me in and said, "Are you trying to destroy their careers?" I didn’t know what he was talking about. It seems that there’s a code that’s used to assure someone’s promotion. One has to write the narrative using special words that indicate that the person you’re writing about is simply the best person that has ever been. I sort of snickered, and he said, "I know. I know… Just do it." So I did it.

I thought about that when I read the letters to Judge Walton supporting Scooter Libby. Even under supervision, I couldn’t have made up such flowery malarkey. But besides that [that being the baloney in those letters], I was confused by their point. The plea from Libby, consider "my whole life," or the requests in the letters to "consider all of his good works," or even the ones that said the verdict must be wrong because Libby just wasn’t that kind of guy, surprised me. I thought justice was blind. A crime is a crime, no matter what one’s history. And asking the judge to ignore the verdict based on Libby’s previous good works seemed bizarre [I’ll bet they didn’t take the previous lives of those prisoners in  Guantanamo into account]. Does that mean if you’ve been good, you get a free pass on being bad every once in a while?

I hate to over-read things, but it seems to me the letter writers are hopelessly naive, or live in a bubble. The way to get leniency is to admit guilt and apologize, not feign sainthood. Libby and his supporters don’t seem to think he did anything wrong to this day. My point is that there’s an elitism in that whole set of people that’s staggering – above the law. It reminded me of that Bush line at some posh fund-raiser, "Some call you the elite. I call you ‘my base.’"…