Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Two year investigation for this?

John Podhoretz:

SO, after 28 months, what we are told is this: Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, lied about his conversations with two reporters. He lied about those conversations first to FBI investigators in the fall of 2003 and then to a grand jury in the spring of 2004.

And in telling those lies, says independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby sought to impede the investigation into the public exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

That's all, folks. The grand jury in the most hotly watched Washington political-legal investigation since Whitewater concluded its business yesterday by returning charges against one man and one man alone — who, the grand jury alleges, didn't tell the truth about when and how he discovered a piece of classified information.

Scooter Libby was not charged with the misuse of that information, or with the unlawful exposure of an undercover agent, or with involvement in a conspiracy to reveal her identity. He is, it is worth repeating, charged only with lying about his knowledge of it.

Here's how it breaks down. Libby testified that he first heard about Valerie Wilson's identity in a phone call from NBC's Tim Russert when, the indictment flatly alleges, he never discussed her with Russert. In any case, according to the indictment, Libby had learned Wilson's identity at least a month earlier. That's the basis of two of the five charges.

The indictment further charges Libby with making a false statement and committing perjury in his account of another phone call from another reporter. What's strange about these two counts is that they derive from testimony in which Libby actually acknowledged having answered a question (from Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper) about Valerie Wilson's CIA status.

...

But there's little question that the breathless hopes of Bush critics for the past few weeks — their desperate belief that Fitzgerald would reveal an executive-branch conspiracy to discredit administration critic Joseph Wilson that led officials to commit a despicable crime — have been dashed.

Indeed Fitzgerald shot down the Democrats and the antiwar left by saying the case had nothing to do with Iraq or the reasons for going to war. That is an inconvient truth that they are sure to ingore.