Hilary Rosen: "I Ran Into Joe Wilson At Starbucks This Morning"

I ran into Joe Wilson at Starbucks this morning. We hugged and thought neighborhood coffee was as good a way as any to celebrate Scooter Libby's guilty verdict yesterday. Seeing Joe looking happy and fresh made me realize that so many people outside of Washington see this verdict and the events of the past few years as just about politics, not about people.

Joe and Valerie are neighborhood parents. We both have boy-girl twins and our kids played together sometimes. Just like lots of my friends in the neighborhood, they are fun, friendly, smart, passionate and accomplished. Their kids are adorable and play well with others. They are certainly better behaved than my kids.

Joe was always a grand personality. If there is a room at the party that is louder than others, where the talk is frenzied and the opinions are flying, then Joe is sure to be in the middle of it. Valerie is more reserved but no less engaging when she is talking.

So here they were, a neighborhood family and then the most powerful men in the country decide that the Wilsons were getting in the way of their personal agenda of economic domination through warmongering. There lives were overturned. And after they were targeted and Valerie's CIA career was ruined, they were attacked and victimized all over again by the right wing defenders of the White House for having the temerity to stick up for themselves.

I never thought they were defending themselves. The Wilsons knew and still know that when the powers that be can do that to them, they can do it to anyone. And they needed to be stopped. It seems by the reaction to the Libby verdict that no one at the White House or their defenders has learned any remorse or taken any responsibility for what they've done to the Wilson's other victims of their bullying or self-interested governing for that matter.

The Wilsons are moving on. This week in fact. They are taking a family ski trip this weekend and then moving out west permanently. The kids will start in a new school in two weeks.

I am sad they are leaving the neighborhood. But who can blame them. They need a fresh start.

The country needs a fresh start too. I am just glad that this guilty verdict happened this week. I see it as a going away present to the Wilsons.

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