Trying to make sense of the Libby trial

If you want to court insanity, try to make sense of the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury trial. I gave up on making sense of this after I learned that not only will I not learn whether Richard Armitage (who isn't on trial, and won't be) committed a crime by revealing to Robert Novak (who also isn't on trial, and won't be) that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA (neither Wilson nor his wife are on trial, nor will be), but the prosecutor and the judge have also agreed that whether Armitage committed a crime by revealing this information, or anyone else for that matter, is immaterial to the trial. So, the only guy on trial had nothing to do with the actual leak that started the investigation, and is getting strung up apparently because the prosecutor figured he had to nail someone after spending several million tax dollars. The actual offense that the prosecutor set out to investigate may not have been an offense at all, and no one seems to care. This doesn't work wonders for my confidence in the American legal system.

I've been reading two completely different sources to learn the proceedings, and that hasn't helped either. My hope was that by relying on two different sources, I'd get an better idea of what's going on. Each day I read one report from The Washington Post Online, a mildly left-of-center newspaper, and one from National Review Online, a solidly right-of-center news magazine.

I feel as if I'm reading about two different trials. The Post tells a different tale every day, but each tale has the same theme: Fitzgerald is impaling the Bush administration itself on the truth. They got a lot of hay for a day or two on a memo that made it appear that Libby thought he was being set up as a sacrificial lamb in place of wunderkind campaigner Karl Rove. The problem with this line of reasoning (which appears to be part of Libby's defense, by the way) is that it leaves me wondering why the administration wouldn't sacrifice Armitage instead. After all, (a) Armitage did the leaking, and (b) he is, by all accounts, no great friend of the administration (Novak himself described the source as "no partisan gunslinger"). The Post doesn't spend much time on the defense's cross-examinations.

NRO by contrast relies more or less exclusively on the defense's cross examinations, so it tells essentially the same story every day:

• Fitzgerald calls a witness,
• said witness testifies in such a way that it appears that Libby said one thing to him, and another thing to Fitzgerald,
• then Libby's lawyer cross-examines and shows that the witness can't remember correctly some events that you'd think s/he could recall.

The reporter, Byron York, has it pretty easy in that regard; he need use only one template prepared on his computer, load it every afternoon, and run a script that inserts the witness' name and the elusive event.

I used to think it was important to remain an informed citizen by keeping up-to-date on things like this. Now I follow it out of morbid curiosity.