TIME: "Libby still had time to obsess about Chris Matthews"

[Coexist]

How Libby Came Undone

Convicted Tuesday of four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI, former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in the end, was responsible for his own undoing. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece critical of the war in Iraq.

Throughout the trial, Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald kept coming back to Hardball. Libby seemed a singularly obsessive viewer of the show. His exacting attention to how host Chris Matthews characterized the role of the Vice President in sending Wilson to Niger undermined the defense's case that Libby had too much on his mind to have really bothered to lie — or even to have remembered what exactly to lie about. They argued Libby had other preoccupations; the war, possible al-Qaeda attacks, the 27 national security topics and 13 terrorist threats that were in Libby's briefing book on the day a CIA briefer testified that he told Libby about Joe Wilson's wife.

All of those issues may have been on his mind, Fitzgerald argued, but Libby still had time to obsess about what Chris Matthews was saying about him on Hardball — and time to call Tim Russert and complain about it. Fitzgerald had notes and witnesses to prove that Libby, for a least a few minutes a day, stopped thinking about "the next 9/11" and instead counted the number of times Matthews questioned why "the Vice President" had sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to look for evidence of Iraq's interest in WMDs. It was Fitzgerald's job in court to stress Libby's role as a senior commandant in what TIME speculated was a Bush White House "war on Wilson."

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So at the moment the White House was assiduously touting the imminence of a massive terror threat in Iraq, they also appear to have mobilized much of its senior staff in a campaign essentially to tar Joe Wilson as a wimp. And in that is the sobering message beyond the Libby trial's legal minutiae: The same wise men who were assessing a phantom threat to America's domestic peace were the same people taking minute note of their own PR.

Perhaps the larger moral here is that had Washington torn itself away from the petty melodramas such as who dissed whom on Hardball — or in the pages of TIME — perhaps there would have been more scrutiny of the intelligence that led the nation into Iraq in the first place.

the rest...

[Mark E. Smith]

1. Beautiful

Thanks!

[Coexist]

2. no problem!

it is great reading.

[Coexist]

3. afternoon kick!