Rich, White Republicans can't go to jail...!

Ah, the screams of injustice from the ruling class. The double standard isn't working this time... how can this be? Amidst death threats and a barrage of angry letters from the rich, white Republican establishment, Judge Reggie B. Walton is sending Scooter off to jail, right on schedule.

"Unfair!" the Republicans screamed.

Yes, Libby was found guilty on four felony accounts... but come on, he's our buddy! He's a 'good guy!' And he's one of us... you can't lock us up, like common criminals! (Shades of Paris Hilton here?)

BILL MOYERS: Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places - including his boss Dick Cheney - outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. He kicked sand in the eyes of truth, to throw investigators off the trail. Said the Chief Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald: "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered." The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. The judge - Reggie B. Walton - a no-nonsense lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush - called the evidence ‘overwhelming' and threw the book at Libby. You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his defenders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to free Scooter Libby.

Alas, poor Scooter, a 'casualty' of partisan politics. Never mind that he lied and obstructed justice. These rules don't apply in the Beltway, I mean do they really?

BILL MOYERS: One beltway insider is quoted saying the neo-cons are "weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness" of Libby's sentence. And there's the rub. None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state it baldly, as he pleaded on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal for Bush to pardon Libby. For believing "in the nobility of this war," wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a "casualty" -- a fallen soldier the president dare not leave behind on the beltway battlefield. Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-god dead and dying and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. All the beltway warriors can muster is a plea of mercy for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.

In the end, it is the loss of their double standard that seems most troubling to the Washington establishment. But as one honest conservative, former Governor of Virginia James Gilmore put it rather bluntly: "If the public believes there's one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system."

I wish I believed this wasn't their intention.