If conservative blog Powerline is a representative voice of the right, it's pretty clear where the GOP's values sit: with money, not morality. A new post posits that the third-quarter economic growth rate of 3.8% is "of vastly more importance, in every way, than whatever indictments do or do not come out of Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury." Funny, that logic didn't matter when Republicans impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, despite a tenure marked by the addition of 18 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years, and the lowest budget deficit in American history. Of course, Clinton's lies had nothing to do with launching a $203-billion war that's killed more than 2000 Americans on false grounds, as this case seems to be. Now that Bush insiders are facing indictment, perjury isn't such a grave crime. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Republican from Bush's home state, recently told Meet the Press, "I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars." In her lengthy statement during a closed session on Clinton's articles of impeachment, she took a very different view: "I do not hold to the view of our Constitution that there must be an actual, indictable crime in order for an act of a public officer to be impeachable."
More fibbing? In a new National Journal piece, Murray Waas reports that "Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."
10.28.2005
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Aren't the Powerline boys a bunch of lawyers? Their belief that the robustness of the economy is more important than the rule of law gives us pretty good proof that the conservative movement (or at least the Bushian version of it) is morally and ethically bankrupt, not to mention inherently dishonest about its motives.
I'd also think twice about taking my legal business to Faegre & Benson, where the author of the Powerline post you're linking to works.
JT
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