Rich: Why Bush pardoning Libby is a slam dunk
 According to New York Times columnist Frank Rich, it isn't a question of if President Bush will pardon a former White House aide convicted last Tuesday on charges of lying and making false statements, but when. Rich calls the prospects of a pardon a "slam dunk" proposition, which is a mocking reference to words that former CIA chief George Tenet reportedly used before the invasion of Iraq to describe the existence of WMD that were never found.
"Even by Washington's standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby," Rich writes in Sunday's paper. "Of course he will."
As Rich sees it, "A president who tries to void laws he doesn't like by encumbering them with 'signing statements' and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn't going to start playing by the rules now."
"His assertion last week that he is 'pretty much going to stay out of' the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld," Rich adds, " The only real question about the pardon is whether Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans' political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008."
Excerpts from Rich's column:
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Either way, the pardon is a must for Bush. He needs Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney's Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.
Libby's novel was called "The Apprentice." His memoir could be titled "The Accomplice." Its first chapter would open in August 2002, when he and a small cadre of administration officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American people. The climactic chapter of the Libby saga unfolded last week when the guilty verdict in his trial coincided, all too fittingly, with the congressional appearance of two Iraq veterans, one without an ear and one without an eye, to recount their subhuman treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
It was WHIG's secret machinations more than four years ago that led directly to those shredded lives. WHIG had been tasked, as The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq's supposedly imminent threat to America with "gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence." In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse.
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What Libby did -- fabricating nuclear threats at WHIG and then lying under oath when he feared that sordid Pandora's box might be pried open by the Wilson case -- was despicable. Had there been no WHIG or other White House operation for drumming up fictional rationales for war, there would have been no bogus uranium from Africa in a presidential speech, no leak to commit perjury about, no amputees to shut away in filthy rooms at Walter Reed.
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