SCOOTER & COMPANY Hard times but not hard time

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-libby_thinkjul08,1,6590746.story?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed

SCOOTER & COMPANY
Hard times but not hard time

Published July 8, 2007

Forgive Lewis "Scooter" Libby if he spent last week pining for the old days, back when the White House enjoyed high approval ratings and unchecked power, back before Libby himself became a convicted felon who needed President Bush to commute him out of prison.

There was that one night, in fact, a Mission Accomplished kind of night, at the home of Vice President Dick Cheney.

It was April 13, 2003, days after the fall of Baghdad. As Bob Woodward recounted in his book, "Plan of Attack," Cheney had invited to dinner Libby, then his chief of staff; Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary; and Kenneth Adelman, a former diplomat and Reagan aide turned analyst and pundit.

The four men, neoconservative heroes all, raised their glasses to Bush, Adelman told Woodward. They congratulated one another on how right they were, and how wrong everyone else was, about the wisdom and ease of invading Iraq. And they chuckled at the caution expressed by Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft and others who had worried about the complexities of deposing a dictator in the volatile Middle East and then occupying a fractious nation of 25 million people without United Nations approval or much support from the rest of the world.

It was all so wonderful, Libby said.

FULL article at link.