Informed Speculation

Two days after the issuance of indictments, one thing is clear: PlameGate was not the ‘cancer at the heart of the Presidency’ that Bush’s opponents so blatantly cheered for. Indeed, it is fast becoming a non-scandal. Cheney’s chief-of-staff lied to a grand jury and may or may not go to jail for it. The crushing blow longed for by the Left turned out to be a glancing tap, and I predict that within two weeks, this story will be mostly dead and gone.

Too bad for the Frank Rich and MoDo types who were just sure that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to weave a tale of an administration run wild with huge conspiracies involving the Iraqi Working Group, active efforts to gin up intel, and Nixonian smear tactics that cut right to the heart of Bush’s team. Instead, Scooter Libby told some reporters one thing and the grand jury another.

If you think I’m engaging in partisan cheerleading, consider: on the basis of Fitzgerald’s investigation, we cannot even assume that Valarie Plame was outed improperly. That’s a far cry from revealing a trumped-up case for war, and all the wishful thinking in the world won’t make it otherwise. Typical of the non-story stories we can expect to see now that, in Fitzgerald’s words, the investigation is “essentially complete”, is this complete bit of fluff by Matt Cooper of Time, in which he takes several hundred words to reveal this bombshell:

Basically, I asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife having been involved in sending him to Niger. Libby responded with words to the effect of, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.”

Wow…have you stopped trembling with excitement yet?

You’ll search in vain for anything else – that’s it. And this, felt Time, was worth an article. I hope the Pulitzer Committee is paying attention…

UPDATE 10:17 a.m.: More along these lines from the great Mark Steyn:

…[I]f [the Democrats'] object in the Fitzgerald investigation was somehow to get the administration’s Iraq policy criminalized, they failed utterly. Look at it this way: If “Iraq” is the James Bond movies, Scooter Libby is the gal who played Moneypenny in ”The Living Daylights.” Happy Fitzmas.