Who’d have guessed Scooter Libby would grow up to be Hester Prynne? June 26, 2007
Posted by Idta in : MyBooks , trackback“Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.”
— The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
When Hester Prynne’s adultery was exposed, she refused to identify her baby’s father (the cowardly Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale). Apparently torture was out of the question in those pre-enlightened times, long before Guantanamo.
In order to protect Rev. Dimmesdale, Hester bore the entire punishment alone. For her loyalty, Rev. Dimmesdale helped her receive the colonial-era version of a presidential pardon:
“The penalty [for adultery] is death. But, in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”
Further demonstrating his cowardly and selfish nature, Rev. Dimmesdale publicly ordered Hester to reveal the name of her accomplice:
“I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner …. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him … to add hypocrisy to sin?”
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Like Hester Prynne, Scooter Libby took the blame in the Valerie Plame leak scandal while trying to protect more powerful accomplices. And like a modern-day Reverend Dimmesdale, the Bush Administration publicly pretended to want to expose the wrong-doers.
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