A few years down the road, no one will remember “Scooter” Libby. Sure, the name might ring a bell, but that’s mostly because he has a name that sounds more like it should belong to a NASCAR driver than a Washington politico. His alleged leak of Valerie Plame’s identity, and President Bush’s recent commutation of his prison sentence, will simply be the first two lines of Libby’s obituary and his Wikipedia entry.

I’ve said that no one will remember Scooter Libby’s name in a few years because if the Democrats remembered a few choice names of their own they might be more hesitant to criticize the president’s decision to commute Libby’s sentence. After all, President Clinton’s last few days in office looked more like an episode of “Prison Break” than a dignified presidential exit.

On his last day in the White House, President Clinton pardoned both Patty Hearst and Marc Rich. Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence doesn’t tip the scales compared to Clinton’s use of his pardoning privilege to clear Hearst, an armed bank robber, and Rich, a tax-evading financier who kept pumping money into Iran during the hostage crisis.

In the case of Rich, Clinton’s pardon may have been politically driven by Rich’s ex-wife’s contributions to Clinton’s campaign. Hmmm … overuse of presidential powers for political gains … sounds like some of the Democrats’ recent accusations about Bush and the Libby commutation. I guess the Democrats don’t believe that money buys happiness but it sure can buy a presidential pardon.

Even now, no one remembers the name Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state who leaked Plame’s identity in an interview with Robert Novak. Unfortunately, it was Libby who instead became the target of frustration toward the administration that employed him. What could have been a message to Washington and the press about the importance of intelligence instead became a poor political maneuver by the Democrats to go after the current administration.

The whole Valerie Plame identity scandal was a story started and hyped by the press. What began as an argument about protection of sources eventually became an easy, high profile story to fill headlines. This is a stinging example of the media’s ability to create the news they want the nation to hear. The situation sounds like an example straight from a political science 101 lecture about the media’s influence on government and politics. The best lesson we can learn is to take the news we hear with a grain of salt and ask our own questions.

If this was such a touchy identity issue, why were the media talking so much about it? Why did the media claim that journalist Judith Miller didn’t have to serve a subpoena because the identity leak wasn’t linked to a crime, then turn high tail and turn the story into seemingly the crime of the decade, pinning it on the Bush administration?

Soon, someone will strike it rich with a tell-all book that answers these questions, but even that will be short-lived.

The media will create new propaganda for the Democrats to ignorantly follow up on and we’ll have a new story to read about in the papers. At least Scooter Libby won’t have to read about it behind bars. Hopefully the liberal media’s next scapegoat will be as lucky.