Scooting

Let's not go nuts over Bush's commuting of Scooter Libby's prison sentence. The president did the right thing as always, and he did it because he is, after all, a student of history—a man with a keen grasp of how the past affects the present, with an acute awareness that if we don't study history, we're doomed...blah, blah, blah.

And Bush knows (because he is so very incisive) how poorly previous Scooters have fared in prison. If it were only one, we could overlook it; but the history of felons named Scooter—convicted felons, that is—languishing and having a just-not-fun time behind bars is too obvious to ignore.

In the thirties there was Al "Scooter" Capone, criminal extraordinaire. One would have thought that if anyone was cut out for the prison life, it was a tough hombre like him—bootlegger, murderer, crime boss. And yet in prison he spent most of his time ducking attempts on his life, including a very famous incident in which someone tried spiking his coffee with lye. Even in a federal penitentiary—in the thirties!—there were demented baristas scrounging for tips—they're not just at Starbucks. Scooter Capone—tough on the outside; kind of a misfit behind those walls.

In the nineties we had Jeffrey "Scooter" Dahmer, a different case entirely. We've all heard of unwanted guests eating people out of house and home. Dahmer simplified the task to simply eating people. And yet in prison, among murderers and rapists and child molesters, Dahmer had trouble "connecting." Even the hardest core convicts—the ones who saw little wrong with chopping up people and saving their remains in Ziploc bags—even they balked at the idea of actually eating those remains. One day one of his disconnected peers, taking the moral high road, inflicted some lethal head trauma on Scooter , thus denying him the good fortune of Scooter Capone: a parole and a lingering death from syphilis.

Actually Scooter Libby isn't not even the first Scooter of the century. That honor belongs to Paris "Scooter" Hilton. Love her or hate her (or simply download her sex tapes) everyone has to admit that jail and Scooter Hilton do not mix, and for a judge to incarcerate a claustrophobe like her was unconscionable. Only through her tremendous strength of character—her ability to envision herself somewhere else—was she able to survive with her sanity intact. Of course, unlike Ms. Hilton I wouldn't have envisioned myself in a coal mine, but it seemed to worked for her.

The point is this: the nickname Scooter doesn't work well in prison; and instead of continuing to make the same error over and over, let's follow the lead of our president and start dismissing cases against all Scooters.

Two caveats: The nickname cannot be grandfathered. That ploy did not work for Scooter Kevorkian and, along the same lines, I wouldn't expect to see Michael "Scooter" Peterson out looking for a new wife any time soon.

And finally, don't worry: there aren't any Scooters at Gitmo. I checked.