I was so angry and hurt that I thought I would write that I would never read National Review again. But it isn’t true. The world is too small not to continue to know the magazine, to read it, and to interact with it.

Still, this much is true: From the moment Scooter Libby was indicted, all the way down to this moment of his sentencing, I have judged the character of many acquaintances in the worlds of writers, public intellectuals, and conservative politicians—their courage and their trustworthiness—by a simple measure: whether or not they stood up for Scooter Libby. ~Joseph Bottum

It seems to me that it would require a good deal more courage for a conservative today to stand up and say, “Perjury is a serious crime, and it should be punished whether or not the perjurer is a highly placed Republican administration official.”  All those lectures about the rule of law c. 1998 have to have meant something, or else most of the people calling for Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice (who are now calling for Libby’s pardon) were impressively shameless hypocrites. 

The people who have jumped on the Save Scooter bandwagon have been almost entirely conservative establishment fixtures and Bush loyalists (though some loyalists seem to have more loyalty to Libby than Bush!).  Most of those moved to work and write on his behalf, except perhaps for Fred Thompson, seem to have met or known the man.  They apparently respect him, and so go to bat for him.  Fair enough.  Derbyshire simply doesn’t care, and for that he gets called “vile”?  It’s just bizarre.    

For any conservative pundit in the mainstream movement to dissent from the received wisdom that Libby was treated unfairly and his unfair treatment is a Big Deal is a fairly bold move under the circumstances.  It also requires a bit of gumption to declare indifference to the “plight” of a man who has, for some reason, become the mainstream right’s martyr.  Whether or not you agree with the argument that you should care about Compean and Ramos more than you care about Libby (I don’t), it makes sense to reject the hysteria over what is actually a legitimate conviction for perjury (quoth Andy McCarthy: “The evidence that Libby lied, rather than that he was confused, was compelling”).