Game Over

Dean Barnett offers an observation that is, at best, very unsettling about the conduct of the Libby prosecution. Not anything new on the political right; a lot of people are not enamored of the way Fitzgerald handled himself in this.

Dean's observation is more disturbing because it gets to the heart of the matter in a context that is more discomfiting for the ease with which we can identify with the dynamic. I can't and won't speak for anyone other than myself but I don't want a prosecutor acting-out this way:

And yet there’s something about this case that still strikes me as unsettling and unnerving. For political reasons, the purportedly aggrieved parties of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame got their own private prosecutor whose entire job was to make sure someone went to jail because of the scandal in which the Wilsons were the featured players. Even as the main charges turned out to be unfounded or at the very least un-provable, an undeterred Fitzgerald fought on, determined to get someone, anyone, thrown in jail.

As I watched Fitzgerald give his presser yesterday, I didn’t get the sense that this was a man who thought justice had been done. No, his satisfaction was more akin to the athlete who had just won a big game. And the loser was Libby, even though he had no interest in taking the field.