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The reason Bush officials have believed they can simply break the law with complete impunity is because the Beltway culture in which they operate believes that. Most importantly, our media stars absolutely believe that, that lawbreaking by the most powerful political officials who rule their world is not real lawbreaking, even when they are convicted in a court of law — after ample due process and with the best legal defense team which Marty Peretz and Fred Thompson could help pay for — of committing multiple felonies.There are many reasons why the political press fails to investigate and uncover real wrongdoing on the part of the government, but a leading reason is that they do not see lawbreaking as genuinely wrong or the lawbreakers as corrupt. These are their friends and colleagues — their socioeconomic peers and, with increasing and disturbing frequency, their spouses and family memebers — and while Important Bush Officials might be “guilty†of engaging in harmless and perfectly accepted political “hardball,†they are never genuinely bad people engaged in genuinely bad acts. And they certainly do not belong in criminal courtrooms or prison.
It is so painfully revealing, though equally unsurprising, to read one of our most prestigious pundits, the Leading Liberal in Time Magazine, argue that Paris Hilton should be imprisoned as an example of the stern rule of law that prevails in our country but convicted felon Lewis Libby — who deliberately lied under oath to the Grand Jury and as part of an FBI investigation — should be set free. Or that George Bush’s spying on Americans in violation of the criminal law is a matter of mere political controversy which Democrats ought steadfastly to avoid. There is no class of people more defensive of the prerogatives of political power than our “journalist†class, even though, in a healthy and functioning democracy, the exact opposite would be true.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/11/perjury/index.html
