Let’s be clear, also, on exactly what we’re talking about in the case of  Scooter Libby:

Libby’s lies were employed specifically for the purpose of protecting Dick Cheney. For it was Cheney who had decided that Joe Wilson must be smeared; Cheney who did not want the public scrutinizing the rationale for the war in Iraq too closely.

There was good reason for that, of course; that rationale has been completely and utterly discredited. This country was railroaded into this war, and Dick Cheney was the sneering engineer; Wilson was a threat specifically because he dared suggest what is now obvious, that the Bush administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat in order to justify war.

There is now virtually no question that this is exactly what the administration - what Cheney - did.

And so Libby’s lies, and now this pardon, cannot and can never be seen independent of the war itself. That Iraqi and American blood continues to run unabated in the streets of Iraq, and will continue to do so indefinitely because we have no way of ending this war - that is the bitter harvest of Libby’s lies, of Cheney’s lies.

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, and it was Libby’s job, specifically, to ensure that we do not learn from the past. He did that job well; he has now been rewarded by The Leader. The war goes on.

But hey - Bill Clinton lied about sex, and isn’t that the same thing?

Update: And as Glenn Greenwald notes, you reap what you sow:

We have the country we have — one in which our most powerful political leaders are literally beyond the reach of the law in every sense, where we casually invade and bomb and occupy countries that have not attacked us, where our moral standing in the world has collapsed with good reason, where we our viewed on every continent in the world as a rogue, dangerous and lawless nation — because we are ruled by a Beltway elite and political press that is sickly and cowardly and slavish at its core.

That Dick Cheney’s top aide, one of the most well-connected neoconservatives on the planet, is protected from the consequences of his felonies ought to be anything but surprising. That is the country that we have.