The Buck Stops Where ?

His credibility with the general U.S. public is already much lower than that of any President since Richard Nixon. Yet now our Pretender-in-Chief is faced with a situation that may well destroy whatever small reservoir of goodwill remains even among his hard-core supporters. Will he pardon Scooter Libby? How could he put a positive spin on that? He can't, argues Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post.

"Will Bush say that he doesn't believe Libby should be punished since all he did was fall on a dagger aimed at the vice president? That's possibly the most honest approach -- though also the least likely.
Or will Bush say nothing at all, and stick to the strategy of stonewalling on this case? It's a strategy that, in part because of the press corps' lack of tenacity, has served him well thus far.
Washington is abuzz with pardon talk. The thinking appears to be that Bush will grant one before Libby has to go to prison, which could be as soon as the end of July. The pardon will cause Bush a little political damage -- but what's a little more political damage these days?
But this kind of thinking may underestimate the potential fury of the American public.
Pardoning Libby would send the public the message that this White House thinks it is above the law. It's a point critics have made time and time again, whether it relates to the treatment of detainees, warrantless wiretapping or the purge of insufficiently partisan U.S. attorneys. But this time, the charge just might really stick.
Because Libby's lies came in the context of a White House campaign to defend its actions in the run-up to war, pardoning him would inevitably call renewed attention to the most tragic and least forgivable mistake of Bush's presidency: misleading the American people into a disastrous war. It could send the anti-war movement into overdrive.
And pardoning Libby -- a lawbreaker who may have been acting under orders from his superiors -- would finally and fully associate Bush in the public's mind with the one transgression that has forced a president out of office in the modern age: A cover up."