Reply #64: H20 Man did you see this Salon Article from Libby's childhood friend

[KoKo]

because reading your post...I thought that somehow this article plays into what the Defense is trying to say "was and is" Libby's Psyche:

.........


Scooter's tragic innocence

Why my friend Scooter Libby is loyal to Bush, Cheney and an arrogant administration whose values are not his own.

By Nick Bromell
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AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, walks to a cab as he leaves court Jan. 23, 2007, in Washington.

Jan. 24, 2007 | As someone who's an old friend of Scooter Libby's and at the same time a frustrated critic of the Bush administration, I find I can see Scooter's trial in just one way. What we are witnessing here again is an old drama of ambitious innocence foundering in and probably drowned by a world much more wicked than it ever knew. To be sure, Shakespeare would not have penned a plot that hinges on the hero's claim that he simply "forgot." But this is an American tragedy, after all. The backdrop here is not the steeps of Mount Parnassus or the gorges below Delphi. It's the Washington Beltway, clogged with SUVs and littered with half-eaten Whoppers and Big Macs.

Until yesterday, the riddle that preoccupied the press was the apparent "paradox" of Scooter Libby. Some pundits wondered how a first-rate legal mind could have forgotten such crucial details of his professional life or told such clumsy lies. Others wondered how a "buttoned-down lawyer" could wear a cowboy hat and drink tequila. And still others wondered how such a canny operator could be persuaded to fall on his sword to protect his superiors.

Now we have something new to wonder about: Was Scooter really a "scapegoat" used to protect Karl Rove, as his attorney alleges? Or is this just a strategy Scooter's lawyers have devised to portray a shrewd insider as a victim of palace intrigue?

Just below the surface of all these ruminations on Scooter's character lies the question that has tortured me for the past six years. I've known Scooter since we were both 11-year-old "new boys" at a boarding school in New England. Later we were roommates, co-captains of the debating team, and later still we both went to Andover. We had the same teachers, read the same books, and played hundreds of hours of touch football together. We were close friends, drawn to each other not just by shared interests but by a shared position on the cruel status ladder of these elite prep schools. In a world dominated by rich WASP jocks, we were both too small to play varsity sports. Scooter was a Jew. I was a scholarship boy whose family never owned a new car.

To me, the puzzle of Scooter Libby is not that he's a highly paid lawyer who likes to drink shots of tequila now and then. Nor is it the question of whether he was betrayed by his superiors. The deep mystery to me is that for years Scooter somehow managed to reconcile who he is with what his masters and mentors demanded of him. Easygoing, tolerant, humane, balanced, modest and witty, he is precisely everything that the Bush administration is not.

So, I ask: How could Scooter work enthusiastically for politicians who enflame and profit from anti-gay hysteria, when he is not himself a homophobe? How could he work untiringly for politicians who denied the fact of global warming, when he himself respects science? How could he pledge fealty to men allied with the Christian right, when he himself is secular and rational? (If his local public school started mandating the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, Scooter would certainly yank his kids out and send them off to Andover.) In short, how could someone like him work for the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney?

The simple answer often given is "naked ambition," but that obscures what's most mysterious and compelling about this case. After all, if Scooter had been content with the standard American dream of power and wealth, he could have spent his life making millions very safely for a corporate law firm.

To understand Scooter Libby, we have to think about the particular form of his ambition. And to perceive that, we have to look at the peculiar education Scooter and I received at New England prep schools in the 1960s.

At Eaglebrook and then at Andover, Scooter was always a model citizen. He got excellent grades, and he participated enthusiastically in all aspects of school life. He cared whether the school teams won or lost, and he developed close, even sycophantic relationships with the teachers we had -- including teachers who had about half his IQ. I remember being especially puzzled by Scooter's high regard for one "master" (that's what prep-school teachers were called back then) -- a classic football-coach type who drilled us in marching and taught us how to salute the flag smartly. Most of the other boys in our little clique called him "Dumbo," but not Scooter. Scooter flattered him, and joked with him, and seemed genuinely to respect him.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/24/scooter_libby/?source=rss