Looks like Irving "Lewis" Libby plans to twiddle his thumbs till he gets an outright pardon--as Chimpy the Prez makes his White House final exit?

"We remain firmly convinced of Mr. Libby's innocence," attorney Theodore Wells said Monday. "However, the realities were, that after five years of government service by Mr. Libby and several years of defending against this case, the burden on Mr. Libby and his young family of continuing to pursue his complete vindication are too great to ask them to bear."
--from Matt Apuzzo's AP report, "Libby to Drop Appeal in CIA Leak Case"

Well, that's one way of looking at it, but the reality seems to be more that the most our Irving could have gotten out of an appeal was a new trial for his role in blocking the investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent, which after another extended period was unlikely to result in a cushier sentence than the $250K fine already paid for him by Republican Friends of Crime Inc. and the 30-month prison sentence that Chimpy the Prez commuted in July. In fact, by the time of Irving's next sentencing Chimpy would likely be out of the White House, with any luck facing a lifetime's worth of criminal charges for a tiny portion of the murder and mayhem perpetrated by his regime, and a likely Democratic successor would be most unlikely to sign onto the GOP's Coddle Our Favorite Felons (COFF) program.

Which means that, legally speaking, it's all over now except the inevitable pardon from Chimpy the Prez which was presumably the price of our Irving's silence regarding all he knew about the Bush regime's criminal rampages.

The bright spot is that once the paperwork is properly shuffled, there will no longer be any ongoing legal proceedings to provide cover for the felonious overlords of the Bush regime to withhold comment on the entire shameful episode of their punitive partisan political outing of an American undercover agent. (Does anyone doubt that if the affiliations had been reversed, the Democratic perpetrators would by now be on Death Row, if not already executed?)

In other words, as an e-correspondent put it today, from this point on:

"Any journalist interview with any White House witness in the Plame matter needs to lead front and center with questions about Plamegate."

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