Scooter’s tragic innocence

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:13:00 +0000

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.

Salon.com > Nick Bromell

Scooter’s tragic innocence