the Centrist

         After reading an article I wrote a few weeks ago, referencing the injustice of the Scooter Libby trial … a blogger said, “See, just like the Clintons.”  I spit my coffee all over my laptop. To compare Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Ken Star is like comparing District Attorney Mike Nifong to John Jay.  For one thing Fitgerald’s four year investigation ended with only one indictment and conviction … and that had nothing to do with the case, it was for perjury. 
Moreover, according to Chicago Sun Times Mark Steyn: “Patrick Fitzgerald invited the jury to view a narrow perjury case as something epic: ‘What is this case about?’’ the special counsel mused. ‘Is it about something bigger?’ … and he had the answer on hand: ‘There is a cloud over the vice president. . . . There is a cloud over the White House.” … but what is that cloud?  Steyn continued: “On the alleged violation of Valerie Plame’s identity, Fitzgerald was unable to produce not only a perpetrator but any crime.  Is the cloud then a more general murk? A politically motivated attempt to damage the white knight Joe Wilson as he sallied forth against the Bush dragon?   No. The man who leaked Valerie Plame’s name was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department and a man who dislikes Rove, Cheney and all their neocon warmongering works. The journalist he leaked it to — Bob Novak — was also opposed to the Iraq war. Neither Armitage nor Novak had any animus against Joe Wilson. On the contrary, they broadly share Wilson’s skepticism on the threat posed by Saddam. There was no conspiracy, just Armitage gossiping like the gravelly voiced schoolgirl he’s been for years. … How did this cloud get there and stay there even though it had no meaningful rainfall? Answer: Patrick Fitzgerald.” In summary … “So much of the current degraded discourse on the war — ”Bush lied” — comes from the false perceptions of the Joe Wilson Niger story. Britain’s MI-6, the French, the Italians and most other functioning intelligence services believe Saddam was trying to procure uranium from Africa. Lord Butler’s special investigation supports it. So does the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Wilson’s original charge is if not false then at the very least unproven, and the conspiracy arising therefrom entirely nonexistent. But the damage inflicted by the cloud is real and lasting. As for Scooter Libby, he faces up to 25 years in jail for the crime of failing to remember when he first heard the name of Valerie Plame …”
 My point is that by now it should be obvious to all but the hopelessly inane, that when any Prosecutor spends tax payer monies to investigate a case when he already knows the guilty party, he is either on a fishing expedition, or a political hack.   And that is exactly what Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did when he failed to charge the ‘guilty party’, Richard Armitage, but chose to focus on an accusation of perjury. 
But perhaps what is more disturbing is that media pundits have not stressed this injustice.  Americans are having a difficult time separating the facts from fiction, in no small part because the main stream media, our free press, has failed us.  They refuse to use logic simply because it is no longer in vogue … ‘feelings’ are.  In the relativism of Political Correctness it mattered not that Ken Star indicted and won a plethora of cases including the removal of a rogue sitting governor, it mattered who he was indicting. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, had the advantage of indicting a man on the enemy list of the left leaning press.  So it was obvious that most would agree, because most felt, along with Fitzgerald, Armitage, et. al. the White House had to have stooped to the level of cheating and lying in order to ‘sell’ it to them.  After all, ‘all of them are dishonest’.  So even in the face of proven innocence it was Fitzgerald’s duty to his leftist comrades to fabricate a ‘cloud’ around the White House, even though there was none.  Fitzgerald likely remembered the fate of his predecessor Ken Star.  They still persecute him, even with all of those convictions.  What would they have said about his four year fiasco if he had none?  So even in a time of war, with our men and women on the front lines and the evidence staring him in the face, what he ‘felt’ became more relevant that what ‘is’ … and after all, we all remember innocence is dependent on what ‘is’ is.