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.

Newsweek's Fineman Sees Fear in Bush's Eyes During Iraq Speech

Howard Fineman has a well deserved reputation in Washington as being an exceptional purveyor of conventional wisdom. His reputation doesn't depend on original thinking or on pungent analysis. It depends on his ability to figure out what the conventional wisdom is among the Washington elite and then report on it. So, when he writes that he sees fear in Bush's eyes, it is significant. Not because it is true, although it may very well be true, but because this may become the conventional wisdom of the Beltway elite.

If you click on the link in this entry's title and read the article another fact jumps out at you. He apparently believes that one thing that drives Bush is his fear of being branded a "loser." Not that over 3,000 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq. Not that thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives in Iraq. Not that our reputation around the world has been totally trashed or that we have lost the moral high ground that we had after the attacks on September 11, 2001. No, according to Fineman what Bush is afraid of it being branded a "loser."

This brings up the problem with George W. Bush and indeed the whole Bush clan. They are in government not to serve the public, but to satisfy their egos. It is not about us, it is about them. It is not about solving America's problems, but about filling their need for public adulation. As far as we can tell, the history of the Bush family in politics is a history of self-gratification.