SCOOTER LIBBY VS LYNNE STEWART: A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES. A lawyer who broke the law in assisting her terrorist client communicate with his followers gets less time (28 months of a 30 year sentence according to guidelines) than Scooter Libby. But the reactions could not be more different.

Whatever Happened to Lynne Stewart?

PASSION DISTORTS PERSPECTIVE. Nowhere is that more evident than in Rep. John Conyers' inquiry into the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Yesterday, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wasted a calendar day holding hearings on “The Use and Misuse of Presidential Clemency Power for Executive Branch Officials.” Apparently afflicted with the glut of inside the Beltway gut-feeling policymaking, Conyers confessed he launched the inquest because his “suspicion was that if Mr. Libby went to prison, he might further implicate other people in the White House.” Chief among his witnesses was former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who testified that the president’s “own involvement in this unseemly smear campaign reveal a chief executive willing to subvert the rule of law and system of justice that has undergirded this great republic of ours for over 200 years.” Conyers also invited Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman, who condemned then-Governor Bush’s refusal to commute the death sentence of a former client of Berman’s in 1997, on the grounds the convicted murderer had been abused as a child.

As Wilson’s comments demonstrate, the Left has treated the Libby commutation as a constitutional crisis. However, there are genuine legal outrages involving those who have killed Americans in the name of jihad – and these outrages have interested Rep. Conyers not in the least.

Read the whole thing.

[Hat tip: The Corner]

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