Scooter the Second [Scooter the First being Phil Rizzuto, of course] has been convicted of lying to the grand jury and sentenced this week to 2 and a half years behind bars. I don’t think many people thought much about his plight or really cared how severe a sentence he would receive. And, as it turns out, the severity of the sentence should have been no surprise, in part because he had a bunch of clowns, incompetents, and criminals in his corner as character references. Appearing on Scooter’s behalf through letters and other testimonials were the usual suspects, all of whom cited Scooter as a family man, a dedicated public servant, and specifically not an idealogue. How do we know this? Because the likes of Richard Pearle and Douglas Feith [manipulators of US foreign policy in the middle east and instigators of the disasterous Iraq invasion] said so. So did Donald Rumsfeld [the man responsible for sending 125,000 men and women to do a job that would have been tough for 500,000 – and then never acknowledging his deadly errors]. But the creme of the bunch is Henry Kissinger, he of Cambodia invasion fame [2 million dead by the time the Kymer Rouge finally lost power] and the government official who approved the overthrow of Salvador Allende [assassinated during the takeover] and the installation of the murderous Pinochet in Chile [and the subsequent deaths of thousands]. Kissinger said in defense of Libby that he knew what it was like, with all the pressures of federal service, to “forget” how and when things happened. Let us never forget the role of Kissinger in the darker pages of US history. It continues to amaze how he, like a bad penny, keeps cropping up.