Scooter takes the fall...

First, no grown man should have a nickname like "Scooter." It just shows how wrong things are in the Halls of Power in America today. But aside from having a nickname that should never have left the playground, Lewis "Scooter" Libby is not a naive child, nor is he a victim of a White House bent on using him as a scapegoat. He is an attorney, and any attorney knows you can't lie when authority comes knocking. At least, not without risking severe repercussions if you get caught.

His "I was too busy to remember" defense was, in the end, indefensible. When you conspire to destroy someone else's career and throw mud in the face of that person's husband, you don't forget. Scooter Libby may not have been the only person who leaked the identification of Valerie Plame to the press, but he was one of the conspiritors. Rather than own up to his complicity, he lied to a Grand Jury in an effort to muddy the water. Fortunately, the prosecutor didn't abandon the case, as so many do. Instead, he pursued Libby and he successfully brought Libby to justice.

The right wing pundits may say it was unfair; they may squawk about the whole Libby trial as a case of justice gone awry. They may call for him to be pardoned, as he likely will be. But the real issue here is that Libby defied the judical system in the United States, and he was caught. He may suffer. That's what the system is designed to do: punish those who brazenly defy it.

He doesn't deserve our sympathy. Better to save that for the thousands of war casualties and the tens of thousands of men and women who will go through life without the liberty of their own limbs, their eyesight, their hearing, and their sound mental health. Libby and his cohorts let them down by demeaning truth and by challenging those who - rightly - said that the justifications for war were fabricated by people in the White House inner circle.

Libby may not have planted the mines. He may not have pulled the triggers. But he helped push the United States into an unjust and unjustified war. And for the blood on his hands, he deserves to spend time in jail. It is a shame that the net could not have been made wider to encompass those who he worked for, too.