Intense Partisan Tribalism?

I don't think the ripples from the Libby commutation are anywhere near dying out yet, from my newsgathering. And of course rightly so. Maybe this was not the tipping point or the last straw, but it certainly is a suitable cause for outrage that extends well beyond the world of progressives to those with a strong interest in justice and the cause of democracy or even those who know how the American so-called system of justice can grind down Real Folks trying to get by, even in many cases for what are quite arguably victimless crimes while conspicuously letting the Ken Lays, George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, Karl Roves, and, yes Libbys repeatedly skate or scoot by despite repeated far more serious legal violations.

I think it should be a high priority to keep this story alive, and I sense many share that feeling. This is not at all another ho-hum bush pratfall. Stuck anchors - okay, move on. Obstruction of justice - not so fast.

One recent post at Anonymous Liberal starts out with a comparison to the OJ verdict that I find quite intriguing. The author, perhaps a little injudiciously under the circumstances, uses the term "intense partisan tribalism" for the common theme here. As an aside, that reminds me of the time I nearly provoked a brawl by expressing disgust at repeated abuse of the common rules and conventions in a volleyball pickup game by invoking the term "jungle ball."

I'm not sure I really like the analogy between the reaction to the two verdicts all that much. While I am mortified at the joy in OJ's verdict, I can at least appreciate that there is some honest basis for it. In the case of Libby it seems to me an entirely self-indulgent martyrdom complex that is at the heart of this, e.g. the swine in question having said "liberal media" so many times as they knelt and prayed for their criminal, err, unelected president that the hypnosis has taken over in the form of full-on group hallucination. It is the reminder of that strange epoch and the cerebral catalysis I appreciate. I am taking the liberty of reproducing the post in full:

An astute commenter in a previous thread noted the similarities between the reaction by many conservatives to the news that Scooter Libby's sentence had been commuted and the reaction by many African-Americans to O.J. Simpson's acquittal.

I remember back in 1995 being shocked that so many people were ecstatic about the acquittal of someone who seemed so obviously guilty of murder. Watching the jubilant reaction to the verdict really helped me to appreciate just how deeply many in the black community distrusted the police and the criminal justice system generally. The people cheering in this picture no doubt genuinely believed that O.J. had been framed by racist cops.

Of course, that belief didn't come out of nowhere. It was the product of a long history of very real racism and disparate treatment within the justice system. And that history led a number of otherwise reasonable people to ignore the facts of the case and come to view O.J. as a victim, not a vicious murderer.

In Libby's case, similar dynamics are clearly at work. Many conservatives who have been conditioned to view everything through a hyper-partisan lens have become convinced that Libby is the victim of political persecution. As the reliably unhinged Mark Levin put it:

The way I see it, Lewis Libby was about to become a political prisoner and the president prevented that.

As bizarre a view as that is, I can at least chalk it up to an intense partisan tribalism. Levin and his ilk are partisan to their core and have long since lost the ability to see reality through anything but the most distorted of partisan lenses.

What I don't understand, however, are the people like Marty Peretz and Alan Dershowitz, who clearly don't suffer from the same partisan psychosis as the Mark Levins of the world, but nevertheless share the view that Libby's prosecution was some sort of liberal conspiracy. Today, in the midst of a totally unhinged rant, Peretz wrote:

This case has been a foul one from the beginning, if for no other reason than that the special prosecutor already knew the name of the federal official--Richard Armitage--who had leaked Ms. Plame's name--arguably not a violation of any law--when he set out to trap Libby on perjury counts . . .

That's quite some perjury trap Fitzgerald set given that Libby had already given his false story to investigators months before Fitzgerald was appointed to the case. And as a factual matter, Libby had leaked Plame's identity to Judith Miller well before Armitage leaked the same information to Bob Novak. It's pure happenstance that Novak ran with the information and Miller didn't. But Marty doesn't care about the facts. This is the realm of truthiness.

Remarkably, though, Alan Dershowitz has a post over at the Huffington Post that actually makes Peretz look sane by comparison. In it, Dershowitz accuses not only Fitzgerald and Judge Walton (both Republican appointees) of being partisans out to get Libby, but he levels the same accusation against the panel of Appeals Court judges who affirmed Walton's bail decision. As Orin Kerr points out, that three-judge panel included "Federalist Society favorite David Sentelle and solid conservative Karen LeCraft Henderson." In Dershowitz's alternate reality, however, all of these Republican appointees are somehow engaged in a political battle with the White House and Libby is just some poor schmuck who got caught in the middle.

Now I realize that both Dershowitz and Peretz hold neoconservative views that make them more likely to view Libby sympathetically. But I can't for the life of me understand how anyone who isn't hopelessly blinded by partisanship could think that Libby is the victim of a political prosecution. As Professor Kerr, certainly no liberal himself, recently observed:

The Scooter Libby case has triggered some very weird commentary around the blogosphere; perhaps the weirdest claim is that the case against Libby was "purely political." I find this argument seriously bizarre. As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as "overwhelming" and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.

I find this claim bizarre. I'm open to arguments that parts of the case against Libby were unfair. But for the case to have been purely political, doesn't that require the involvement of someone who was not a Bush political appointee? Who are the
political opponents who brought the case? Is the idea that Fitzgerald is secretly a Democratic party operative? That Judge Walton is a double agent? Or is the idea that Fitzgerald and Walton were hypnotized by "the Mainstream Media" like Raymond Shaw in the Manchurian Candidate? Seriously, I don't get it.

Yeah, me neither Orin.