{"id":5246,"date":"2007-07-04T14:23:02","date_gmt":"2007-07-04T14:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5246"},"modified":"2007-07-04T14:23:02","modified_gmt":"2007-07-04T14:23:02","slug":"against-making-hay-from-the-libby-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5246","title":{"rendered":"against “making hay” from the Libby case"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite my reservations<\/a> about the prosecution of Scooter Libby, I think it is lawless for a president to reduce the punishment of his own friend and ally, especially if the administration demands tough and automatic sentences for everyone else. I have no doubt that the president should be denounced for this act. I do, however, have some doubts about whether Democratic politicians should do the denouncing. It seems to me that Republicans are in the national dog house because they have a record of incompetence, rashness, and injustice. But Democrats are also in trouble, because people don’t believe that they can govern. Only about one in four Americans currently approves<\/a> of the Congress, slightly fewer than approve of the president. More importantly, most Americans distrust government <\/a>today and are unwilling to give it new responsibilities–which is bad news for progressives. Under these circumstances, I disagree with liberals who say<\/a> that Democratic politicians should “make hay” by criticizing Libby’s commutation. If I were a Democratic elected official, I’d let the president’s decision speak for itself–people don’t like it<\/a>. But I’d try to give the impression that I was spending all my time and energy solving your <\/em>problems: Iraq, education, health care, global warming. “Shenanigans in the White House again? Sorry, but I really can’t focus on things like that right now. We have an education bill we’re working on.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite my reservations about the prosecution of Scooter Libby, I think it is lawless for a president to reduce the punishment of his own friend and ally, especially if the administration demands tough and automatic sentences for everyone else. I have no doubt that the president should be denounced for this act. I do, however, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}