Planet Abell

W hat makes the commutation of "Scooter" Libby's sentence so appalling is that it perpetuates the appearance at least of a conspiracy that now reaches the Oval Office. Even the mother of all presidential interventions, Ford's pardon of Nixon, bears up better: at least it helped to expedite a national healing process. A Bad Boy, But A Good Boy Yes, President Bush said in his statement that Libby had been a bad boy and had to be punished, and the fine and probation Is this proof that the Bush White House has devolved into a collection of dead- enders , slogging through their last throes? were left untouched. But Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff is family. He was a part of a what looks very much like a big effort to spread the administration's war propaganda by attacking critics with smears and dirty tricks. Political crimes are particularly heinous because they are about stealing power. They are ideological and self-justifying. By ensuring tha...

O urs is a nation of spectacular ironies. The greatest democracy on Earth, the greatest democracy ever, anywhere, does not directly elect its president, gives its vice president virtually no constitutional responsibilities and leaves it to the three branches to work out any differences in opinion about where the lines are drawn. One of the greatest strengths of our republic, and potentially one of the greatest weaknesses, is the freedom we have to do what want, more or less. Oh sure, there are laws and conventions and politeness but it is in our DNA to be "free." I cannot possibly relate, born and bred on these shores as I am, but it must be this, above everything except perhaps the near certainty to make a living wage, that makes this nation a magnet for people from just about everywhere else. We are a laissez-faire society, built on a covenant that we each will exercise an appropriate level of self restraint. Whatever that is. The president has awesome power, we learn in el...

(Disclosure: edited 2/26 for typos) Something has been bothering me about the field of Republican presidential hopefuls, and it isn't the absence of Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich. This is it: Since 2000 (a political eternity) there has been no doubt about an open GOP ticket for '08. Dick Cheney made clear he was not going to run for president after a presumptive two-term Bush administration, leaving no heir presumptive. And yet there is no young, vibrant Republican in the mix or even mentioned as a dark horse. No conservative media darling whose candidacy is so audacious, so presumptuous, it just might work. There is room in the tent -- witness talk of Thompson and Gingrich, who poll better than some announced candidates in some polls, and even whispers of a third-party putsch by Michael Bloomberg and Chuck Hagel . Of the presumed leaders John McCain is a re-tread and, thanks to his support of the of Bush war strategy, a far cry from the "rebel" he was perceived of a...

The untimely death of David Halberstam will, I hope, provide a peg for new discussion about the proper role of dissent against war. May only generals assert that a war cannot be won? Is it the troops, or is it the strategists who are being attacked when war policy is criticized? What are we to think of those who, during wartime, say that the war is wrong (when else is there an opportunity to do so)? A Pulitzer-Prize winning correspondent whose early Vietnam War despatches expressed a pessimism about the prospects of "success" that would not become the conventional wisdom for years, Halberstam would a decade after his reporting write a best seller about the long list of very smart men who thought that war had to be fought, and won. "The Best and the Brightest," published in 1972 as the war still raged on, chronicled the creeping dementia and paranoia of three administrations. By then, opposition to that war was widespread, as is opposition to the Iraq now. Hal...