What's all this breast-beating and rending-of-clothes about the Scooter Libby commutation? I don't get it. All of sudden, seven years in, people are sonorously intoning about how this is a "nation of laws, not of men." Says who? What did George Bush do this week that he hasn't been doing, pretty consistently, his whole life?
He didn't want to go to war? Fine--he used his Special Privilege to get in the national guard.
He didn't like the national guard? Fine--he used his Special Privilege to Not Show Up.
He couldn't find a job? Fine--he used his Special Privilege to get an oil company.
He couldn't handle that job? Fine--he used his Special Privilege to unload it and buy a baseball team.
On and on it goes, stumbling Candide-like though a life cushioned and protected nearly as much as Prince Charles'. Every event of his biography seems to teach him the same lesson: You Are Not Like Them. The Rules Were Not Made For You. Whatever you want to do, Georgie-boy, you just go ahead and do it. You and your special friends. The world is your playground. The help can clean up after you; that's what they're there for.
In the original debates with Al Gore, he made it clear that he judged his life and his morality not by his actions, but by his feelings about himself: I'm a good man because I think I am.
And by extension, of course: my hideous charnel-house of a "war" is justified because I believe in it.
His family, his home state of Texas, and now his whole country has let him get away with this crap for 50-odd years. And all of a sudden, now, we're going to notice and get upset?
Please.
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