My gawd, what a piece of tripe. This is a passionate letter pleading for President Bush to pardon Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstructing justice and perjury, as a result of obstructing Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the Bush Administration's conspiracy of deliberately outing Valerie Plame's secret status as an undercover CIA agent, thus destroying her career and putting her international contacts at risk. The author makes one valid point: "Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe" But as the recent hearings on the federal prosecutor firings have made clear (Fitzgerald, by the way, was on the firing list), what this means to the White House is "personal loyalty over all." Libby was a good soldier all right - with an allegience not to the American people but to his bosses. He took the bullet to stop the investigation from reaching higher into the White House, perhaps implicating Cheney or even Bush himself. There's a good case to be made that high officials who commit criminal acts should be held to at least as high a standard, and perhaps the author of this piece should meditate on this truth.