The Opinionator

July 3, 2007, 9:48 am
A Frustrating Commute
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: George Bush, Scooter Libby

President Bush pleased two people – himself and Scooter Libby — by commuting Libby’s prison sentence, writes Robert Novak in his Chicago Sun-Times column. Bush’s decision “pleased but did not fully satisfy restive conservatives, while enraging his liberal critics. Libby himself can breathe a sigh of relief that he does not have to serve prison time, but hardly anybody else is all that happy.”

Count Patrick Frey, a Republican and a prosecutor in Los Angeles Country, among the unhappy conservatives. “The jury said Scooter Libby did the crime. He should do the time,” Frey writes at his blog, Patterico’s Pontifications. Frey thinks there will be political consequences from Bush’s actions: “Yes, we were already going to get beaten in 2008 because of Iraq. But now, we’re going to get slaughtered. This particular convicted felon wasn’t worth it.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial page isn’t satisfied, either: “By failing to issue a full pardon, Mr. Bush is evading responsibility for the role his Administration played in letting the Plame affair build into fiasco and, ultimately, this personal tragedy.” The Journal editorial adds, “Mr. Libby deserved better from the President whose policies he tried to defend when others were running for cover. The consequences for the reputation of his Administration will also be long-lasting.”

But wait — at least one liberal is happy. “What Bush did was just and fair. It was the right thing to do,” suggests Timothy Noah, Slate’s “Chatterbox” columnist. Noah writes:

It would have been wrong for Bush to pardon Libby, as many Republicans urged him to do. Libby committed a crime, and it wouldn’t have been right for Bush to do anything to minimize the attendant disgrace or to lighten Libby’s $250,000 burden. “The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged,” Bush said. And so it should be. Bush did not intervene to spare Libby further disgrace, as Ford did with the Nixon pardon, and he didn’t preempt a prosecution that might reveal embarrassing facts about himself, as Bush’s father did. He waited until it was all over, and he acted humanely. Yes, it was inconsistent with his past indifference in such matters, particularly when he was governor of Texas. One can only hope that, having behaved decently once, he’ll acquire the habit. In the meantime, bully for him.

As George Washington law professor Orin Kerr writes at The Volokh Conspiracy, “President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead.” Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman wonders whether Bush’s empathy for Libby’s plight could, just maybe, lead Bush to reconsider his support for long prison terms for all people not named Scooter Libby who have been convicted of federal crimes. On his Sentencing Law and Policy blog, Berman writes of President Bush:

I now hope that he will instruct all members of the Department of Justice to demonstrate similar compassion for other defendants sentenced under the federal sentencing guidelines. After all, it seems the President views a significant fines and probation and harm to reputation and family as “harsh punishment.” I am sure a number of defendants now appealing punishments that include also a prison term will be glad to have the top executive now defining what sorts of alternatives to imprisonment are sufficient in his view.

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July 2, 2007, 5:14 pm
Half Life
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: Sports

W.W.F.-C.I.O.: Jonathan Last of the normally union-averse magazine The Weekly Standard thinks professional wrestlers should form a union. Four wrestlers, including Chris Benoit, have died this year, Last notes in his Philadelphia Inquirer column. “None was even 50.” He continues:

If you think back to the wrestlers from your childhood Saturday mornings, you’ll be chilled at the list of the dead: Crash Holly, Kerry Von Erich, Owen Hart, Adrian Adonis, Yokozuna, Brian Pillman, Davey Boy Smith, André the Giant, Rick Rude, Bruiser Brody, Miss Elizabeth, Big Boss Man, Earthquake, Curt Hennig, Junkyard Dog, Hercules, Big John Studd, Road Warrior Hawk.

And here’s the scary part: None of those wrestlers lived past 46.

Last says that “a striking number of the deaths were related to steroid or drug use.” He cites a USA Today study from 2004 that found that “wrestlers have death rates roughly seven times higher than the general population.” Last writes:

Pushed to achieve comic-book physiques, wrestlers must perform despite pain or lose their contracts. And unlike traditional athletes, they cannot rely on meritocracy to protect them, as in “as long as I excel, they can’t touch me”; they can’t precisely because the outcomes are scripted. Add that at the major-league level, professional wrestling has essentially become a monopoly. (A nascent promotion, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, is beginning to establish roots in the wrestling world, but it is far from being a true competitor to the WWE.)

The management of WWE can hire and fire at will because they are less like the commissioners of a sports league and more like the owners of a theater.

Except that at this particular theater, the actors often die.

Professional wrestling, Last concludes, “has come to make 19th-century coal mining look like a cushy gig.”

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July 2, 2007, 9:36 am
He’s No Churchill
By Chris Suellentrop
Tags: George Bush

Lynne Olson, the author of “Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England,” has decided to give President Bush some interpretive advice while he reads her book. Olson writes in The Washington Post: “He hasn’t let me know what he thinks about it, but it’s a safe bet that he’s identifying with the book’s portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush’s hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president’s wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out — but they’re between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.”
Among the similarities Olson sees between Bush and Chamberlain: “Like Bush and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders”; “Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build up a strong coalition of European allies”; and “Chamberlain also laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the office of prime minister.”