I think prison is far too good a punishment for Mr. Libby.
Then again, how many political hacks, elected officials, or their families can you count who sacrificed but did not gain from the trust the people put in them? Okay, maybe a few.
I am sure, like me, that you were listening to nightly news and listening to one talking head after another lamenting that poor tiny-minded Scooter is a sacrificial lamb, going to jail to protect Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others in the White House who sat around their expensive mahogany tables laughing about how they would fry Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson because Mr. Wilson had the courage to blow the whistle on the lies piling up from Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice, Mr. Fleischer, Mr. Pearl, Mr. Wolfowitz, and of course the mysteriously "disappeared" former Secretary of State Colin Powell — the man who sold the nation, and his own reputation, down the river one afternoon in New York as he repeated what he knew were lies about Iraq on the floor of the United Nations.
Whether our idiot brush-clearing president knew anything then about Wilson, Plame and the plot to destroy them is unimportant. He is merely a string-puppet; the string pullers, most of them, are listed above.
In one way, I do feel sad for Mr. Libby as well. The poor guy will have to spend maybe a year or two in an impeccably clean room — not a cell — and play tennis or chess with his fellow white-collar felons. He will have to eat from a stainless steel tray, not the porcelain he might otherwise enjoy. He will not be able to comfort his grieving wife who now knows the truth about him. He won't be able to make heads turn at insipid Washington cocktail parties or wax eloquent at dinner at Ben Bradlee's house with Mrs. Bradlee, the stomach-turning poseur, fawning over him. He won't have Bob Woodward to defend him any longer.
Oh, the list is miserably long, poor fellow.
And for what? Simply lying, lying, and lying some more — lying to the press, to the grand jury, to the prosecutors, to the FBI and probably his closest family members.
Yet he didn't get the moniker "Scooter" accidentally, so perhaps that dimwit ne'er-do-well in the Oval Office will actually have the gall to pardon him, or maybe he'll get a new trial during which it will come out that God himself ordered Libby to brutalize Wilson and his wife. Then there is always the three-judge panel who will review the lower court's trial record. If he gets lucky and three neo-fascist Bush-appointed judges are chosen to hear his appeal — well, all bets are off and he won't need that tube of jiffy lube he might bring into his prison just in case.