User:Howard C. Berkowitz/Libby

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is an American attorney who, while serving in the triple position of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, National Security Adviser and ---, was convicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators in the probe of the leak of the name of a CIA operative.

A Federal court sentenced him to a 30-month term and a $250,000 fine; President George W. Bush commuted the prison time. He remains a convicted felon and must pay the fine.

Libby was brought into government by Paul Wolfowitz, to assist him in the U.S. Department of Defense.

"Lewis Libby is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law," reads the blurb under his picture on the back flap of his book, a historical novel about Japan at the turn of the 20th century. Straussianism. Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher, is seen by many as one of the intellectual fathers of neoconservatism. Wolfowitz, Libby's teacher at Yale, was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during Strauss' ascendancy, and Libby won membership into that conservative club via Wolfowitz. Part of Strauss' teaching is that ancient philosophers wrote on two levels: for the mumbling masses, but also, and often in contradiction of the literal message, on an "esoteric" level that only initiates could make out. Some Straussians have adopted this code themselves. So, where Homer Simpson would interpret Libby's note as ham-handed fawning over Judy, a Straussian close reader might discern something more devious: a literary file in the cake for both of them.