But what the Libby case demonstrates is that so many establishment journalists believe this just as religiously. To our media stars, “Beltway crime” is an oxymoron, at least when it is committed by a high-level political official. In exactly the way they treated all prior acts of lawbreaking by Bush officials as innocuous political controversies, the Beltway press speaks of Lewis Libby’s felonies as being something other than a “real crime,” all so plainly based on the premise that Libby — as a dignified member in good standing of the elevated and all-important Beltway court — ought to be exempt from the type of punishment doled out to “real criminals” who commit “real crimes.”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/11/perjury/index.html