'The straightforward legal answer is that it plainly does not'

Be Prepared ... For Joy: Sunday Reflection

The liberal media have exhibited great compassion for President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, convicted of multiple federal crimes. “The President came to believe that raw politics had infected the process...he saw how political opponents of his — the President’s — were trying to hurt his son....He thought that the treatment of his son had been cruel,” CNN White House correspondent MJ Lee empathized during breaking news coverage December 1. “The White House concedes that Donald Trump was a factor here,” ABC’s Mary Bruce helpfully added during Monday’s World News Tonight. “The President was concerned that he wouldn’t let up, that a Trump administration would go after Hunter.” But in 2007, the liberal networks were much harsher after then-President George W. Bush offered clemency — not a pardon — for ex-Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted earlier that year of lying during Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who exposed the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame four years earlier, in July 2003, to columnist Robert Novak. Novak was trying to fathom why Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson — a Bush administration critic — was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate reports of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq purchasing uranium from that African nation. Novak later wrote that he cited Plame’s name “in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.” But Libby wasn’t Novak’s source. Fitzgerald had quickly determined that State Department official Richard Armitage — not a Cheney ally — had disclosed the information to Novak, later confirmed by White House aide Karl Rove. Neither Armitage nor Rove were charged. As the Washington Post — hardly a friendly venue for the Bush administration — concluded in 2006 after Armitage’s role became public: “[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.” Still, the media saw the Plame case as a way to challenge the entire Bush administration for what many journalists claimed were lies in the case for the war with Iraq. In October 2005, as the hoped-for indictments from Fitzgerald drew near (remember “Fitzmas”?), former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein hyped: “We are obviously watching and the press is beginning to document the implosion of a presidency.” “If the case goes to trial, look for an awful lot of people seeing it as a way to put the war in Iraq on trial,” NBC’s Tim Russert opined on the October 28, 2005 Today show, hours before Fitzgerald announced he was only indicting Libby. “The Libby indictments have opened the door to making the wider case against the Bush administration that they misled the country into war,” Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift argued on the November 5, 2005 McLaughlin Group. “The next logical step is impeachment....” Libby’s trial began in January 2007. On March 6, a jury found him guilty verdicts on four of the five counts brought by Fitzgerald. “Guilty,” CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric crowed that night, “the highest ranking White House official found guilty of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal.” Earlier that afternoon, CNN’s Jack Cafferty growled that a pardon would be “the perfect parting gesture” for what he described as a lawless administration: “The most interesting part of this story will be whether or not President Bush pardons Libby on his way out the door a year and a half or so down the road. Somehow, it would be the perfect parting gesture for an administration that has come to view things like the Constitution and the nation’s laws as inconveniences that only serve to get in the way of their agenda.” “I got an idea, I got a solution,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews hooted on the June 21, 2007 Hardball. “Pardon him, but send him to Iraq in uniform and put him on the front. Send him to the front. He supported the war, send him to fight it!...In the old days the judges would take a working class kid who got into a scrape with the law and say, ‘Junior, want to go jail or do you want to go join the Army?’ They should say the same thing to Scooter Libby. ‘Want to join the Army?’” In June, the judge decided Libby’s punishment: 30 months in prison, a $250,000 fine, and two years of probation. On July 2, President Bush opted to let the conviction and monetary fine stand, but commuted Libby’s prison sentence. It wasn’t a full pardon, a la Hunter Biden, but the media were nonetheless outraged. “Are conservatives as angry as Democrats?” CNN fill-in anchor Suzanne Malveaux suggested on The Situation Room that night. “There’s going to be a lot of anger out there,” analyst Bill Schneider soon agreed. “I don’t think it’s going to be restricted simply to Democrats. Independents and some Republicans are going to be angry and it’s going to feed into the anger at Washington that seems to be poisoning the mood of the country.” “Above the law?” ABC’s David Muir announced as he opened Good Morning America the next day. “The President decides convicted White House official Scooter Libby should not go directly to jail. He’s not going to jail at all. Was justice served?” “There are many people who feel that this was a travesty of justice,” NBC’s Meredith Vieira argued on NBC’s Today that same morning. On CBS’s The Early Show, viewers heard then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton complain: “What we saw today was elevating cronyism over the rule of law.” Yet the network failed to tell viewers how Clinton’s own husband had pardoned numerous “cronies” in his final days in office, including fraudster and tax cheat Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a big Democratic donor. “A President who lied us into war... has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann hyperbolically thundered on his July 2 Countdown program. On July 3, ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson highlighted the “angry reaction to President Bush sparing Scooter Libby jail time.” Reporter Martha Raddatz pointed out how the President’s inbox was full of requests for pardons and commutations: “There are close to 2,000 commutation requests pending. More than 4,000 have already been denied. During his nearly seven years in office, President Bush has only granted four commutations, including Libby.” That same night, Olbermann returned to froth once more against both President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a ten-minute “Special Comment” rant: “You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is now irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.” “It is nearly July 4th,” Olbermann continued, “the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them, or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them, we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms. We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history — pressure, negotiate, impeach — get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.” “And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely to achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9, 1974. Resign!...Good night and good luck.” For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.

That morning, the skies were clear. For the first time in months, they weren’t swarming with fighter planes and missiles. The air wasn’t yellow with noxious gas or red with the mist of blood. You could not hear gunfire or explosions or the screams of dying men. 'First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up "O Come, All Ye Faithful," the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words "Adeste Fideles."' “I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” veteran Alfred Anderson later said. “It was a short peace in a terrible war.” A pope's request On that day in 1914, Christmas Day — not even six months after the start of World War I and about three years before it would end — troops all along the Western Front had a few precious hours to remember what peace was like. Soldiers from England and Belgium and France arose from their muddy trenches, facing their enemies, and stepped onto the battlefields without a single weapon at the ready. The German troops did the same, and all the men gathered on the battered fields of Europe, where many of their fellow soldiers had lain dead for weeks, stuck in “no man’s land.” Pope Benedict XV had called for a Christmas Day truce. Commanders on both sides outright rejected the idea and insisted that the men would fight, Christmas or not. But when Christmas Day arrived, a wave of humanity overtook the soldiers. It began slowly, on Christmas Eve, described by one soldier as “a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere.” It began quietly. It began with a song. All ye faithful Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade wrote:First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up "O Come, All Ye Faithful," the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words "Adeste Fideles." And I thought, well, this was really a most extraordinary thing — two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war. The truce spread throughout the front, and about 100,000 soldiers honored the pope's truce. The next morning, on Christmas Day, Germans troops shouted “merry Christmas” in English across the battlefield. They held up signs that read, “You no shoot, we no shoot.” Men exchanged gifts. They gave haircuts; they even played soccer. For one day, they could live a somewhat normal life. Life multiplied Too often, the public is disconnected from its military. We forget the atrocities of war. Journalist Sebastian Junger writes about this in his book “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.” In 2009, Junger spent a year embedded with a platoon of Marines in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, which was one of the deadliest places on earth at the time. He saw the tragedies that war brings. He writes: “War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.” By the end of World War I, there were an estimated 20 million people dead and 20 million wounded. It had been billed as “the war to end all wars,” but that would not be the case. In a matter of years, the world would become embroiled in yet another apocalyptic war. But amid it all, the Christmas truce stands as a reminder that humanity can emerge at the darkest times, in the most broken places. The truce of 1914 was seen by many officers and commanders as an act of mutiny and cowardice. To them, 100,000 had disobeyed their superiors’ orders. Adolf Hitler, then a corporal of the 16th Bavarians, reportedly said of the truce: “Such a thing should not happen in wartime. Have you no German sense of honor?” The fact that Hitler hated it makes the whole miracle shine even brighter.A war on war The soldiers themselves, the men dying in trenches and fields, engulfed by gas and smoke and blood, they saw it differently. For one day, the warfare did not involve one superpower against another superpower, with all the soldiers as pawns; it was bedraggled men against the superpower of war itself. British soldier Murdoch M. Wood later said: “I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.” Unfortunately, that is not the case. War remains. Despite the dramatic drop in war and violence following World War 2, we still have to deal with the ugly realities of war. The people who live with those ugly realities the most are not the superpowers but the men themselves. Sebastian Junger, in "Tribe," again: “Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it.” On Christmas Day, many soldiers will find themselves in combat zones, thousands of miles from home, and many veterans will find themselves just as lost and broken. Let’s bring back the Christmas Day truce, for the women and men who must fight every other day of the year. Wherever you are, whoever you’re with, may Christmas be a day of peace and compassion. A day guided by hope. A reminder that our shared humanity is stronger than we know.

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