Where did all the outrage come from? In my view at the time:

It has little to do with Libby and everything to do with Bush, special treatment and the federal sentencing system that applies to everyone else in America.

Why the outrage against Bush?

President Bush, with the stroke of a pen, wiped out Libby's prison sentence. He didn't reduce it. He eliminated it.

Why? Because in his view, the sentence was too harsh. He thought the Judge calculated Libby's guidelines at too high a level. He thought the Judge should have granted Libby a departure from the guidelines. Because he disagreed, because he is President, because Scooter Libby is in his elite circle, he threw the law out the window. He didn't reduce the sentence to a lesser term of imprisonment. He didn't wait for the Court of Appeals to decide if Judge Walton was right or wrong. He didn't wait for the system to run its course. Instead, because he didn't want Scooter Libby to spend even a single night in prison, he intervened and set Libby free.

The hypocrisy:

He made this decision just weeks after he had the Attorney General send his minions to Congress to argue that every federal offense should carry a mandatory minimum sentence from which a Judge cannot depart. In other words, for every other defendant in America, Bush wants to preclude judges from exercising discretion and require them to sentence according to a mathematical formula. Libby, on the other hand, gets a free pass b