Scooter Goes Down

If you’ve been watching, reading, listening to, or even been in the same room as news today, you’ve heard by now that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, has been convicted of four of five counts of obstruction of justice relating to the Valerie Plame scandal. The airwaves are abuzz right now with talk of what this means to the Administration – ranging from one assessment that the Administration’s credibility is as low as it could possibly go and this just won’t make any difference at all, all the way to “this means Cheney must resign!” No, I do not expect Cheney to resign. And no, the Administration’s credibility is not so low, its disapproval ratings are not so bad, that it could not get even worse.

I’ve already written off this Administration, in case you Loyal Readers haven’t been paying attention. Bush’s experimentation with “big-government conservatism” has been an abject failure and letting the neocons get hold of foreign policy has propelled us into a spectacular and bloody misadventure. My concern for the fallout from the Libby verdict is that it will be another stick on the pyre of Republican claims to be the superior party for governing the country. I mean, good lord, the Bushmen have made such a mess of things. So Scooter going down is a symptom, not a problem. It’s a crack in the ship’s superstructure after the iceberg hits the starboard hull; the propellers will rise out of the water next.