The
Perjury is worse than the
Leaking a CIA agent's identity. It's all about the
lies: the lying, the power - lying as the source of power in this country.
The way the people in power keep power is to withhold information from us and to lie. We the citizens of the US are supposed to be sovereign. Democracy is us, and to exercise our sovereignty, to be able to make basic decisions about the future of our country, we have to have basic information. The press is supposed to be the conduit of that information (based on that whole 1st Amendment Freedom of the Press stuff.)
So if the people of the United States aren't getting basic information (from the press), then we can't make the decisions and aren't sovereign anymore. So they lie to us. Either we have the information and are sovereign, or they lie to us, keep the information from us, and
they are sovereign. POWER in a "Democracy" means TO LIE. Liars in government are stealing our sovereignty from us.
From Eric Alterman's "When President's Lie"
In 1945 and 1946 the American people were in no mood to question the foreign policy judgments of their leaders. Most had little interest in or knowledge of foreign affairs generally, except as they specifically related to the war. Nine days after FDR's address to Congress, only 9 percent of those questioned told pollsters that they disapproved of the Yalta accords, though few could explain their provisions with any accuracy. 'Public ignorance concerning the actual decisions of the Crimea declaration is colossal,' complained a State Department report. Nevertheless the nation's citizens remained extremely optimistic about the prospect of future U.S.-Soviet cooperation. (p.59)
For the President of the United States (i.e. the VP Cheney) not to be able to get his war on when the People of the United States (you) don't want to means that he does not have the power to send young men and women to die. LIES follow.
For the President of the United States (i.e. the VP Cheney, in the person of his Chief of Staff Libby) to avoid prison means he needs to be above the laws that he is breaking. When the People of the United States don't agree to let them be above the laws, then that means he does not have the power. LIES follow. Power then gets placed into the hands of the liar, and the power of the Administration is then absolute.
Libby's (and maybe others) perjury, lying about matters of State in a democracy, takes the power away from us the supposedly sovereign citizens of the democracy and is thus the worst kind of crime that can be committed against the U.S. - worse than leaking classified info, worse than outing a CIA officer.
It is the fundamental betrayal of the people we elect for them to usurp our power through lies.