Someone decided now was a good time to roll out Scooter Libby to complain about stolen elections and Iranian nukes. The whole thing was basically an unmitigated blowjob — thanks Monica Crowley!
Crowley: I know that you had been working on the Iraq surge, before this ridiculous politically motivated case against you derailed your effort and actually set back the Iraq surge um, program, for a lot of years and probably cost us a lot of lives and time in Iraq. Since you were one of the early leading authors of the Iraq surge, give us your read about the surge in Afghanistan and do you think it will work, especially under the guy [inaudible] General Petraeus.
To his credit, Scooter (I feel justified in calling him Scooter, since Crowley does) noted that the surge sort of postdated his departure (by a year). He did poof up Petraeus. And he pivoted it back to Iran, and Iran’s nukes…
Crowley: That absurd, political witch hunt that you were subjected to during the Valerie Plame case, your sentence was commuted, but you never did, in fact, get a pardon. Are you still hopeful that eventually you might get a pardon?
Scooter: Well, um, I worked 13 years, maybe 12, something like that, for the Federal Government on national security. In that time, I met Czechs, who had had their lives stymied under communism. I met Kurds who had suffered under the atrocities of Saddam Hussein. I met American families who had lost kids overseas. I learned two things from this. One is the world’s not just. And the second is it doesn’t do a lot of good to whine.
Now, Scooter seems uninterested in relitigating his conviction for lying to protect his boss, Dick Cheney. Interestingly, though, a key point of his appearance — given its focus on Iran’s purported nukes — was to suggest that back in 2003 more could have been done to prevent Iran from getting nukes. You know. 2003. The year he outed a CIA spy trying to prevent Iran from getting nukes?
Maybe the thing to do in 2003 would have been not outing one of the women hunting down those nukes?