President Obama recently appointed a new White House counsel, W. Neil Eggleston. This appointment did not require Senate confirmation, but it did kick up a bit of a fuss, and put the late financier Marc Rich back in the news. On his way out the White House door in January 2001, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, then a fugitive after criminal convictions under tax laws and the trading-with-the-enemy statute. Eggleston, portrayed here, had worked in the White House early in the Clinton administration but was back in the private sector while the Rich pardon was under consideration. He became involved in the fall-out from that pardon in a peripheral way. I don't care about Eggleston, but the very idea of an Eggleston-Rich connection, and thus an Obama-Rich connection, has stirred up the usual hound dogs. My own view of Rich, I have to say, is a fairly sympathetic one. One of the connections that made it possible for Rich to create a spot market in physical oi...