Just before the judge sentenced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for his role in the revenge exposure of a CIA agent by the Bush administration, Libby asked him to look at the big picture.

Libby did not admit to any mistakes, but said, “I ask that you consider my whole life.”

And maybe the judge did, which is why Libby is now facing a total of 30 months in jail and a $250,000 fine.

John Dean, in his book, “Conservatives Without Conscience” uses Libby as an illustration of an “uberneoconservative” and an “exemplary authoritarian.” He points to an American Progress backgrounder that does in fact, consider Libby’s whole life.

It was Libby – along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House – who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11.

It was also Libby who prodded former Secretary of State Colin Powell to include specious reports about an alleged meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations. Libby and his staff reportedly badgered Powell’s speech writers for weeks, culminating in a meeting where Libby presented information in a manner that, according to those who were there, was aggressive and over the top…

Within the Bush administration, what has touched Cheney has also reached Libby and vice versa. Libby’s role in the awarding of at least one no-bid, multi-million dollar contract to Halliburton is a case in point.

For months, the vice president’s office denied that it played any role in the selection of the company once headed by Cheney to repair Iraq’s oil fields. But, as the Washington Post reported [in 2004], it turns out that Libby had been briefed by Pentagon officials before the contract was awarded – raising questions of impropriety at best, and corruption at worst.

So much for the big picture. Libby is dirty, and Dean has no trouble keeping the facts straight.

[Ambassador Joseph] Wilson found the yellowcake report not true (in fact, it had been based on forged documents), and after the president made a contrary statement in his 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson publicly corrected the record. Libby was outraged and apparently believed that by claiming that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative involved in monitoring the proliferation of such weapons, had been involved in sending her husband to Niger, the trip would be perceived as some kind of boondoggle. In fact, she was not involved in the CIA’s decision to ask her husband to make the trip, but Libby leaked her covert identity to members of the news media anyway…

When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigated her exposure, Libby gave FBI agents and the grand jury false statements about the newspeople to whom he had revealed her name. As [social scientist and authoritarian expert Robert] Altemeyer’s work shows, authoritarians have little if any conscience when pursuing their causes, and reason gives way to expediency.

Dean’s book shows how the authoritarian mindset has altered the political landscape under Bushco.

Most conservatives have not publicly objected to the neoconservative, militaristic foreign policy of the Bush/Cheney administration, a predictive failure in light of the fact the social scientists have established that authoritarians as followers tend to be relatively submissive to and unquestioning of presidential authority, particularly when they perceive the president’s beliefs to be consistent with their own views — beliefs which they are expressing their support for.

Which explains how the Republican presidential candidates answer the question of whether to pardon Libby. Without a fancy psychological profile, you can tell where they fall on the authoritarian scale by their reactions.

“What the judge did today argues more in favor of a pardon because this is excessive punishment,” [Former Mayor Rudy] Giuliani [N.Y.] said. [Former Gov. Mitt] Romney [Mass.] said the prosecutor “clearly abused prosecutorial discretion.” Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) said he would wait for the appeals.

Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) said flatly that they would pardon Libby, while former Wisconsin governor Tommy G. Thompson called the sentence “not fair” without committing to clemency.

Four candidates rejected a pardon or sounded negative: Reps. Duncan Hunter (Calif.) and Ron Paul (Tex.), and former governors Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and James S. Gilmore III of Virginia.

Former Tennessee senator Fred D. Thompson, a presumed candidate who did not take part in the debate, is a member of Libby’s legal defense fund and has called for a pardon.