This chart from the August 2007 National Geographic is telling. Perhaps the ardent champions of family values who ran congress for 12 years overlooked this state of affairs. Opposing gay marriage can easily fill your calendar, after all. Though I’d be surprised if the current occupants did much better.

Not often does all of sub-Saharan Africa (except Liberia) have us beat on any measure worth emulating.

There’s not much I need to say about the Libby thing that hasn’t been said. Outraged? Not really. Deeply offended? Yes. But we should have expected it, shouldn't we? After all, as the adage goes, fool me once, shame on me . . . you. Fool me twice, shame on . . . wait. Fool me . . . aw, hell.

But you know what I mean. Why should we have expected anything else? This follows a tried and true pattern for this administration. Everyone in the inner circle, publicly and privately, is exempt from the rules. If necessary, they’ll take the time to change the rules (sometimes publicly, often secretly) or draft up memos explaining why the rules don’t apply in this particular case. But in a pinch they’ll just ignore the rules, knowing that they can cover it up or get around the outcry and the consequences later.

On one hand, I do have a lot of sympathy for Libby. What else is he but a fall guy? If we follow the naive assumption that the person responsible for a given act is the one who should receive the credit, blame, or punishment for it, then he should face the consequences of lying to the FBI and to the special counsel. But bound up in his 30 month sentence was a grander lie about the war and the reasons for going to war in the first place. While he was, to some extent, an architect of that lie as well, the real blame for it goes to his superiors. And many of us who were raised to do the right thing even when no one is looking think they should have served that much jail time (or more) for their roles. But everyone knew better than to hope for that. Libby really only deserved to spend 30 months in jail if Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and the rest were there with him. Justice should be applied fairly and uniformly, or not at all. Because if not fair and uniform, it’s a charade. That’s gist of the national outcry.

The front page of yesterday’s New York Times had a nice historical comparative quote series from Bush to remind us where we’ve been. The first was from back in September 2003, when he said, “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.” I wonder if commutation is what he meant?

Also in the NYT (online edition), was this letter to the editor that eloquently explains the part of the Libby thing that does actually outrage me.

To the Editor:

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he presided over more than 150 executions. In more than one-third of the cases — 57 in all — lawyers representing condemned inmates asked then-Governor Bush for a commutation of sentence, so that the inmates would serve life in prison rather than face execution.

Some of these inmates had been represented by lawyers who slept during trials. Some were mentally retarded. Some were juveniles at the time they committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.

In all these cases, Governor Bush refused to commute their sentences, saying that the inmates had had full access to the judicial system.

I. Lewis Libby Jr. had the best lawyers money can buy. His crime cannot be attributed to youth or retardation. He has expressed no remorse whatsoever for lying to a grand jury or participating in the administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq. President Bush’s commutation of Mr. Libby’s sentence is certainly legal, but it just as surely offends the fundamental constitutional value of equality.

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them.

David R. Dow

Houston, July 3, 2007

The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who represents death row inmates, including several who sought commutation from then-Governor Bush.