Rats

I just saw Ratatouille yesterday, which is excellent and often astonishing and a lot of fun for adults, but it's funny how now I'm thinking about rats and there's Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Fred Thompson.

With Libby there's been a lot of GOP mouthpiece bloviating about how Bush commuting Libby's sentence is somehow the moral equivalent of Bill Clinton as one of his final acts of office pardoning millionaire crook Marc Rich.

While sure, Clinton was wrong to do it, Rich wasn't material to a potential high crime perpetrated in conspiracy including Mister Bush and directed by President Cheney. In fact, there's ample evidence that the Libby defense team put the squeeze on Cheney and got the guaranteed fix from Cheney in return for not calling Dick to testify.

But the most delectable twist of all is this:

Guess who was Marc Rich's lawyer, instrumental in getting the pardon in front of then-President Clinton, and one of the first to call and congratulate Rich once the fix was in?

That's right. The Scoot.


Meanwhile, supposed GOP Presidential savior candidate Fred Thompson turns out to have been a rat who actually squealed, during the 1974 Watergate Hearings, which led to the last Republican President resignation. He was Minority Counsel. He leaked to Nixon and his henchmen what was going on in committee:

The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

They can't handle the truth. They never could.