By Scott Wright

Despite what I must admit has been an uncanny knack for circumventing the law for the past six years, finally, last week, one member of the Bush administration ended up in front of a jury of his peers in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. to answer for his felonious misdeeds.

Thanks to a rubber stamp Republican Congress, it has taken this long for limits to George W. Bush's callous disregard for the law to make the official record. For the first time since the Supreme Court inserted him into the White House in 2000, a jury finally got a chance to remind the commander in chief and his cronies that they are not completely above the law. Truly, the verdict against former Dick Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was a roundhouse elbow that would have made Duke University basketball bruiser Gerald Henderson proud. This is one bloody nose the administration never saw coming.

Basically, Libby was found guilty of being a bald-faced liar on Tuesday. The jury said Libby told tall tales to the FBI once and a federal grand jury twice, obstructing justice in the process. He is set to be sentenced in June, and barring a reversal on appeal (highly unlikely) or a pardon from the president (extremely likely), Libby will serve jail time for his poorly-received Pinocchio impersonation.

Bush watched the verdict on TV, a spokesman confirmed Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps, as he gazed into the presidential boob tube, the dimmest bulb ever to shine inside the walls of the Oval Office heard the word “Guilty!” repeated enough times to finally realize what a low-down, rotten sort he picked to be his vice president. After all, we all know that Libby was only acting on the orders of his boss. (The fact that Cheney did not testify at the trial is revealing, former White House adviser David Gergen said last week. "There's clearly something they don't want to come out," he said.)

The vindictive VP was bound and determined to drag this nation into a war in Iraq and decided in 2003 that he didn't need former ambassador Joe Wilson pointing out all the holes in his ailing argument for justification to shoot first. In an effort to discredit Wilson, Cheney had his chief of staff secretly relay to reporters information he had just declassified himself, which was that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Months later, when authorities tried to find out how reporters first learned the news about Valerie Plame, Cheney instructed Libby to lie about the particulars. As a result of his defense team's inability to convince the jury otherwise, Libby becomes the first White House official to be officially branded a felon since Iran-Contra. And unless or until he gets a free pass for the president or decides to turn state's evidence against his former boss, it looks like Libby's next career move will be becoming an apprentice in the license plate division in federal prison.

Personally, I doubt he'll ever serve a day in the slammer. I'll bet dimes to donuts he gets handed a get-out-of-jail-free card from Dubya before Jan. 20, 2009.

In the months it will take the scenario to play itself out, be prepared for a splattering of verbal fertilizer from the Sean Hannitys and Rush Limbaughs of the world. They've been mouthing for months that Libby never committed a crime because Wilson's wife was not an undercover agent when she was “outed”. But what they leave out of their argument is the logical deduction that Cheney and Libby certainly must have thought they'd revealed her secret identity and consequently broken the law; otherwise why would Libby lie to the FBI and grand jury? Whatever the reason, he did lie, repeatedly, and that's a felony. Point out that tidbit to your conservative friends and enjoy the satisfaction you'll get from seeing their rueful reaction to having a shovelful of their favorite conservatives' compost tossed right back at them.

Don't forget, Hannity and Limbaugh aren't journalists, so the truth doesn't matter to them. They're butt-kissers of the worst kind, not newsman. Just hours after the verdict was announced a real journalist, Newsweek's Howard Fineman, speculated on msnbc.com that the jury was really upset over “how and why we went to war in Iraq and how Vice President Dick Cheney got us there.” Fineman added that because of the verdict and the bad light it casts on Cheney, he is “a liability as never before and even Bush has to know that.”

I wouldn't give George W. Bush credit for knowing which end of a pencil to write with. But Fineman is absolutely right about Cheney's involvement and the jury obviously deduced that the vice president was behind the outing of Plame and the subsequent landslide of lies. Even if the VP doesn't get the jail sentence he deserves, maybe he'll lose some of his ill-gotten Halliburton millions in the civil suit the Wilsons have already filed against him, Libby and others.

After the courtroom cleared, a juror told a gathering of reporters outside the courthouse that at one point during the trial he and the other jurists began to feel like they were deliberating charges against the wrong man. “What are we doing with this guy? Where's (Karl) Rove? Where are these other guys,” the juror said. “It seemed like Libby was the fall guy.”

Obviously, the jurors believed that Cheney tasked Libby with the unenviable job of delivering a message about Wilson and Plame that he believed would cause the most harm to them and other detractors of the “Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger” story. In the eyes of the jury, the vice president threw his chief of staff under the bus. Apparently, it didn't matter to Cheney that the Niger story was a lie in the first place; the VP was feeling vindictive and wanted the information passed to the media, and fast. As with so many other policy decisions to emanate from Cheney's office, the decision to release the Plame story through Libby was hastily made, sloppily implemented and ultimately disastrous for the American people.

Even if you're a Republican, you're an American first and you ought to be glad Democrats are back in control of both houses of Congress. The Libby trial is a perfect example of how manipulative and self-serving -- and damaging -- an administration can become if they're allowed to run roughshod over the rest of the country. This administration is spying on American citizens and believes it has the right to lock any of us away for life without filing charges or granting us conference with an attorney. George W. Bush claims he's fighting international terrorists to keep us safe out one side of his mouth while arguing for amnesty for illegal immigrants out the other. It's all got to stop, and I hope the Libby verdict was the wake-up call the country has been subconsciously craving.

The next big scandal on the radar, one we'd probably never have heard about if Republicans still controlled the Congress, could be the possibly illegal firing of several prosecuting attorneys for politically-expedient reasons. “No one believes anymore these U.S. attorneys were fired for any good reason,” Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer (NY) said last week. House and Senate hearings are already investigating Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department. If you value your constitutional liberties you should have your fingers crossed that he'll be the next Bush administration official called to the carpet.

Party affiliations aside, it's been a pretty good week for the American people. A power-hungry administration got handed a reminder from 12 citizens just like you and me that no one is above the law, not even King George and his band of merry mentals. We've finally got proof that this president is the liar some of us have thought him to be all along. With the administration's dam of deceit finally breached, we've got two years left to see how many more lies come squirting out from between the cracks.

I hope that over the next two years, with a party other than Bush's controlling the Congress, we will finally learn more about the plethora of lies that have been perpetrated by this president.