Washington Insiders Want Libby Pardoned, Public Doesn't

If you click on the link in this entry's title, you will see the results of a poll taken by CNN in which respondents were asked if Libby, Cheney's former Chief of Staff who was recently found guilty of lying to a Federal Grand Jury, should be pardoned. Sixty-nine percent of those polled responded that he should not be pardoned. Yet, according to a posting on www.talkingpointsmemo.com Andrea Mitchell of NBC News claimed on a recent show that polling showed that the public supported a pardon for Libby. What's going on here?

What's going on is very simple: the media elite who live inside the Washington, D.C. "beltway" know Libby, they like him, and they want him pardoned. Mitchell, in particular, is married to the former Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, who is a life-long Republican and who blithely told the Congress in 2001 that America could afford Bush's tax cuts because the Federal surplus was "too large" for the economy. Clearly Alan Greenspan is locked into the Republican elite in D.C. and that elite also wants Libby pardoned. Mitchell and others like her are just repeating what they are hearing on the D.C. cocktail circuit.

The United States is ill-served by most of the Washington media. Like Mitchell way too many of them are too connected to the same people who have brought us the Iraq War, Federal deficits, trade policies that hurt American workers, and tax policies that favor the rich and well-connected, to objectively cover them. They make a lot of money and they benefit from the tax policies of this administration. Their children seldom enlist in the U.S. Armed Services. They have absolutely no idea what Bush's policies are doing to the middle class and too many of them simply don't care. The sooner they are put out of work by the Internet, the better.