North Star Writers Group

That piece of damning testimony during the 1989 tax-evasion trial of Leona Helmsley surely sealed the fate of the former mean queen of New York luxury hostelry. She spent 18 months in the slammer after being convicted of tax evasion and a host of other tax-related charges.

Fast-forward to the present. Have we come a long way, baby. These days, only “the little people” suffer any consequences for breaking the law.

Only the privates, corporals and sergeants got jail time for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The commanders, Secretary of Defense and White House Counsel who cooked up, authorized, and ordered these gross violations of the Geneva Conventions and other U.S. laws got off with, in most cases, medals and promotions.

Only the rank-and-file suffer the consequences of our miserably failed “war on drugs,” combined with our equally disastrous immigration laws. Former U.S border agents Jose Campeon and Ignacio Ramos were tried, convicted and sentenced to 12 and 11 years, respectively, for doing what a lot of people consider was simply their job of guarding the border.

Only one federal official suffered minor consequences as a result of the utterly inept, inane and irrelevant federal response to Hurricane Katrina: Michael “Heckuva Job, Brownie” Brown. Those consequences consisted of losing his job as head of FEMA — a position for which he was qualified only by his political connections and not by any actual crisis management experience.

To this day, only “the little people” who stole mere thousands of dollars from FEMA debit cards have been prosecuted and jailed. No one yet has been held accountable for the flawed levee design courtesy of the U.S. Corps of Engineers or the enormous sums of money FEMA has wasted, not to mention the rampant corruption in the no-bid contracts thrown out the door to businesses with (surprise, surprise) connections to the GOP.

This list goes on and on . . .

In keeping with the tenor of the time, President Bush commuted I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby’s two-and-a-half-year prison sentence just hours after a federal appeals court panel ruled that Libby would have to spend his appeal time in prison. Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice for lying to a federal grand jury about his role in outing a covert CIA agent.

But wait! Surely Libby will still suffer because, after all, the mean old president left intact Scooter’s conviction as a felon, his probation and $250,000 fine. The poor fellow will likely lose his law license and may even not be able to vote, depending on his ultimate state of residence.

Maybe, maybe not. Bush since then has refused to rule out a pardon for Libby. This certainly begs the question of just what Scooter knows about his former bosses, having worked both for Cheney and for Bush as a senior presidential aide.

Besides, it doesn’t take a law license to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist or public affairs consultant for, say, Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel or Blackwater. Nor does it take a law license to receive a princely sum for a book about all his travails and tribulations. As for the fine, Scooter has had well-connected and well-healed supporters raising millions for his legal defense. Surely in all that sea of cash is enough chump change to pay off a paltry $250,000.

After Bush gave him amnesty, Libby went home and celebrated the Fourth of July with his family and friends. Other, braver Americans were unable to enjoy the same simple pleasure. They were caught in a civil war in Iraq thanks to the lies Libby and his bosses concocted and broke the law to defend. Or they were fighting for their lives after being wounded in the aforementioned conflict. Or they were killed in combat and thus unable to enjoy any Fourth of July ever again.

Next time one of his pals or cherished retainers faces legal trouble, Bush should save the taxpayers the expense of an ultimately pointless investigation and trial by simply issuing a pre-emptive pardon. After all, former President Richard Nixon got one from his Republican successor, and our current GOP chief executive has the business of pre-emption down cold.

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