Paris and Scooter on the Scales of Justice

The Liberation of Paris: George Washington University professor Orin Kerr adapts the rhetoric of the Free Scooter crowd to the cause of another celebrity crook, Paris Hilton. Kerr writes at The Volokh Conspiracy, a legal group blog:

The case against Paris was terribly unfair: she was jailed on a mere technicality, namely violating the terms of her probation. Shockingly, the prosecutors never came forward with a single iota of evidence that Hilton actually harmed anyone. None. Nada. And yet the prosecutors ran amok, piling charges upon charges against her. Our commitment to the rule of law — not to mention homage to Alexander Hamilton and Federalist No. 74 — demands that Paris must be set free from her cruel home confinement immediately.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson is stunned to discover that he, too, supports the liberation of Paris. “I don’t go out of my way to follow the latest twists and turns in Paris Hilton’s life,” Robinson writes. “I don’t feel as if I know her or even want to know her. I can’t work up much outrage about the favoritism officials showed in releasing her from jail because I think it was a kind of anti-favoritism that got her locked up in the first place. But why do I even have an opinion?”

A couple of conservatives, meanwhile, have acknowledged that they believe Libby has been treated fairly by the judicial system. “Federal judges do not have a lot of leeway on sentencing,” notes conservative blogger “Captain Ed” Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters. “That’s because conservatives insisted on these sentencing guidelines more than twenty years ago, frustrated with a judiciary that gave too many slaps on the wrist.”

By pushing for a presidential pardon, Libby’s supporters are hurting the conservative movement “in very fundamental ways,” writes National Review’s Andy McCarthy at The Corner. “Lying to the F.B.I. and a grand jury is a very bad thing, even if we all think it was an unworthy investigation,” McCarthy writes. He continues:

The blather about the foibles of memory is just an excuse for people who don’t want to confront that inconvenient fact. Foibles of memory come up in every trial — they were particularly highlighted in the Libby trial because the defense hoped to score points with them given the nature of the charges, but they were not materially different from what happens in every trial. That’s why we have juries.

Witnesses have varying recollections, and juries sort it out. The evidence that Libby lied, rather than that he was confused, was compelling.

McCarthy concludes, “I dread the next time — and you know there will be a next time — when a high-ranking liberal Democrat lies to investigators and obstructs justice. When the outraged grumbling starts around here, like it (rightly) did with Clinton’s lying and obstruction, the media is going to have an awful lot of material to quote from, and they are going to say, with considerable force, that it’s not lying that matters to us but who is doing the lying.”

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You Win-Lose Some

Indochina vs. Iraq: Andrew Sullivan reads today’s New York Times op-ed by Peter Rodman and William Shawcross and concedes that he is “caught short” by the humanitarian case for staying in Iraq: “Will we condemn more innocents to death by staying or by leaving? Would the short term costs of leaving be high but the long-term costs of staying higher? These are largely questions not susceptible to definitive answers.” But in the end Sullivan concludes that withdrawal is the worst option, except for all the others. He writes:

On the morale front, it’s increasingly clear that whatever propaganda advantage al Qaeda gets from US withdrawal (and we’d be fools not to acknowledge they’d get a big lift) must be balanced against the massive propaganda disadvantage we sustain by continuing a doomed occupation. My sense is that al Qaeda has more to gain in the short-term from a US withdrawal; but in the long term, al Qaeda is better served by a continuing and doomed American occupation. Strategically, the balance seems to me to favor withdrawal to the Gulf states and the Kurdish-Turkey border.

Politics imitates “Family Circus”: The new No. 4 candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to the rankings done by Marc Ambinder and Chuck Todd for National Journal is No One. (OK, it’s not Not Me, but it’s close enough.)

During the war in Iraq, can presidential candidates still be “insurgents” who “surge”? The American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta writes of the word “insurgent” at Tapped, “Every time I write that word I feel uncomfortable, because I hate using the same word to describe American political contenders, especially a Democrat who is already being appallingly confused for a terrorist, and the people attacking American forces in Iraq.”

Only some laws were meant to be broken, apparently: “Note that most of the folks who are so furious about ‘amnesty’ when it comes to peasants who broke the law to escape poverty and oppression have no problem forgiving rich Washington lawyers who broke it to cover up for their political cronies,” writes UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community, an academic group blog.

By Chris Suellentrop