A Show Trial?

Jamie Kirchick describes the prosecution of Scooter Libby's perjury as a "show-trial meant to prove a political point." That would be John Ashcroft's political point? Or James Comey's? Or Patrick Fitzgerald's? Alan Dershowitz (another FOL) also asserts that the DC Circuit judges who denied Libby's appeal were also being political. His evidence? He has none, as Orin Kerr notes. The only political point made by Judge Reggie Walton in the sentencing was that Libby's privilege, money, connections, friends and supporters should not mean a different system of justice. And Walton was put on the federal bench by ... drum-roll ... George W. Bush! As Todd Gitlin points out,

so were two of the three Appeals Court judges who sustained that decision ...  one of these political dastards, David Sentelle, was a member of the three-judge panel that installed Ken Starr as Special Inquisitor in 1994.

So an entire inquiry initiated by and staffed by and presided over by Republican appointees was a Democratic political operation? The lengths to which some neocons will go to deny the obvious about the rank corruption of their president and the rank perjury of their friend is absurd.

I might also not that when my friend Jamie refers to "Cassandras" with respect to our constitutional order, he might acknowledge that Cassandra, in Greek mythology, predicted disaster, was ignored, and was proven right. Ahem.