Shut up, suck it up and do your time.

As DC courtiers rise to Scooter Libby's defense, Digby puts them into perspective. (Funny, but they look much smaller up close.) As folks say down South, they just ain't right.

The entire "village" is beside themselves over this, in much the same way they worked themselves into a frenzy over Clinton's hallway trysts. It's that same phony, operatic fervor that leaves the rest of the country wondering what in the hell these people are smoking. Libby may be a friend, but these bilious paeans to his "goodness" and excusing his behavior from everyone from Joe Klein to Condi Rice is verging on bizarre.

[. . .]

My advice for Scooter is to tell all these crybabies to back off and take a lesson from Martha Stewart, who showed twice the class and three times the grit he has. Shut up, suck it up and do your time. It won't be the end of the world --- he'll have a lifetime of wingnut welfare waiting for him when he gets out and the GOP mafia will take care of his family while he's in the joint.

Distracted as we've been this week by Paris Hilton's sob scene over her six-week jail sentence, winger hysteria over the Libby sentencing has been eating at me in that just-below-conscious way. Digby has nailed it. They believe rules are for the little people, and THEY are not little people. Little people are common, and easily intimidated by threats. Here's one from über-winger Michael Horowitz in a letter to the court:

Disposition of the Libby case will have much to do with whether the country will further and gravely descend into "us v. them" feelings of bitterness and contention. As the Bork case led inexorably to the Clinton impeachment, so can the case before the Court profoundly criminalize and poison the country's political process with calls for retribution on the part of many who will never believe--never--that Scooter merits criminal punishment or, God forbid, incarceration. It is an irony that Scooter would be the last to support such an embittering development, but the esteem in which he is held is such that any but the most Solomon-like disposition of his case could easily ensure this occurrence.

Horowitz, for those who don't know, is one of the wingers who put out the "contract" on Bill Clinton that led -- after five years of dogged pursuit -- to an impeachment on charges related to a stained dress.

[h/t The Next Hurrah]