Scooter Libby: Dems React In Hyperbole

• "Accountability has been in short supply in the Bush administration, and this commutation fits that pattern." - Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT)
• "When it comes to the law, there should not be two sets of rules - one for President Bush and Vice President Cheney and another for the rest of America." - Sen. Dick Durbin (IL)
• "President Bush's 11th-hour commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence makes a mockery of the justice system and betrays the idea that all Americans are expected to be held accountable for their actions, even close friends of Vice President Cheney." - Sen. John Kerry (MA)
• "Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world." - former Sen. John Edwards (NC)
• "This commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice." - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY)
• "The Constitution gives President Bush the power to commute sentences, but history will judge him harshly for using that power to benefit his own vice president's chief of staff who was convicted of such a serious violation of law." - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV)
• "The president said he would hold accountable anyone involved in the Valerie Plame leak case. By his action today, the president shows his word is not to be believed." - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA)
• "Congress ought to conduct an investigation of whether or not the president himself is a participant in the obstruction of justice." - Joseph Wilson (Crackpot)

Related: The Plame Game