Entries for June 2007

First, let me be clear about this: I am a great supporter of the First Amendment. I'm a journalist, after all, and it protects me and my ilk. It's also important to the country, and our values. So let's stipulate all of that before we get to what the Supreme Court did yesterday.

After living with the Bush administration for all these years, one notion has become unalterably clear: Vice President Dick Cheney likes to keep secrets. Even more than that, Cheney himself is a believer in the ultimate privacy of the executive branch. We have seen that over and over again with the refusal to reveal the names of those he met with on energy policy. The importance of confidentiality in the executive branch, he believes, trumps everything else.

I bet that now it's all but a done deal: a pardon for Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Today, in sentencing the vice president's former chief of staff to 2½ years in prison for his role in the CIA leak, Judge Reggie Walton really threw the book at him. "People who occupy these types of positions, where they have the welfare and the security of the nation in their hands, have a special obligation not to do anything that might create a problem," the judge said. And that was that.