I had a queasy and sickening feeling in my gut when I heard the news that Bush had commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence.  Maybe part of it was that I had simply not eaten dinner yet.  But it was this feeling that goes beyond my loathing of the George Bush presidency and the basic piling up of one item after another.

There is something off with the American political system.  It cannot seem to handle and sort out and destroy Pure BS.  I say this thinking that I need to pull together some Nixon era and Watergate era material for a future post regarding The Weary.  The writing was on the wall when every one of the Republican presidential candidates said that Scooter Libby ought be pardoned, chief cheerleader being Fred Thompson, the better to pander to a narrow part of the Republican base — the 29 percent of the American voters who support Bush.  The writing was on the wall when Lawyers of the Right, including would be Supreme Court Justice Bork, mind you, defended Scooter Libby. The writing was further on the wall when the David Broders of the world waxed on the pleasantness of Scooter Libby personally.  Or if you go further into the Movement Conservative ranks, the storyline that the National Review and the Weekly Standard and Fox News commentators have which flips the entire course of events on its head.

I have a reaction is “OH, COME ON!” Once upon a time I mocked the oh-so-sensible and serious Joseph Biden for giving a statement like that to one of the Bush Administration’s perfidies, but it dawns on me where Biden is coming from.  To react in proper order to the Bush Administration is to come out with drastic measures that will slide you into the role of fierce partisan.  It is the Flaw of the American system, why anybody seeking the Republican Nomination has to have that funny-vision view of Libby as Victim, and why if I stick around long enough someone might throw the example of my low opinion of Joseph Lieberman as hypocrisy, which adds to this weariness.
It is one more item of a barrel of insults, in its truest essence an item of “Obstruction of Justice”, the continued blocking of Fitzgerald’s vision of that game he is umpiring, commuted so that he will be pardoned when Bush gets ready to leave office.  Frankly, seeing as how Bush is at his low ebb in public esteem, and has nothing much to lose really, I think Bush oughta go ahead and Pardon Scooter Libby today.

Japan’s defense minister resigned on Tuesday over remarks that appeared to accept the 1945 atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dealing a fresh blow to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his ruling camp ahead of a national election this month.

[...]

Kyuma’s decision to quit came after a prominent lawmaker in the ruling coalition’s junior partner had said he should “decide his own course,” a phrase that is often code for urging a politician to quit.

Abe had attempted to quell the furor by reprimanding Kyuma, who said on Saturday that he thought the atomic bombings “could not be helped.”

But opposition parties, keen to press their advantage ahead of the election, had refused to let up pressure for him to resign.

I find this story interesting as a means of comparison between the sort of accepted terms of what an American is supposed to think of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be in the mainstream and what a Japanese is supposed to think.

Flip the accepted opinion from America of “We(tm) had to do it.  Damned right we dropped the bomb.  They started it!” to a Japanese politician murmuring in a “gaffe” (the definition of a gaffe is often just a politically unpleasant truth) of “Maybe they have a point.”

A dozen years ago, there was this furor over the opening up of a Hiroshima and Nagasaki Exhibit, full of acrimony that relatively banal statements on the number of deaths of Japanese civilians gave too much credence to any lingering questions of that impenetrable fortress of “Damned right we dropped the bomb!”  This is the opposite of that Japanese politician’s “gaffe”, though probably not as fully as that exhibit never really questioned the use of the bombs — just simply maintained that it had some rather unpleasant and unsettling effects — but an American politician wouldn’t say anything beyond that because she or he would meet up with the same fate and furor of that Japanese politician.
In college, a professor assigned the class a paper on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more or less wanting “Pro” or “Con”.  I wrote a “pro” paper based on a bit of psychology that the David Horowitzes of the world would eschew in flailing on about Left Wing Professors– oftentimes a college professor will give more leeway in grading if it argues against their worldview.  The only thing I will say is that Harry Truman and The Pentagon lied with their initial statements that “We Have struck a Japanese Military Base”.  And yes, it is a telling lie.