Shorter version: If the investigation had never taken place, there would have been no crime.

If that was sufficient grounds to impeach President Clinton, why do you have a problem when it's a Republican under indictment for the same thing? Well, not quite the same thing, not at all: Perjury not in the face of illegitimate questions about a man's embarrassing yet perfectly legal sexual escapades, but perjury by a high government official about his official actions on the job that were alleged to violate serious Federal statutes.

You stretched too far for that one.

And then there's the Incredible BomToszr mind-reading trick revealing what the Left's thinking. Worked as well as it always has, but I don't have time to write pages of corrections. Just speaking for myself, this Leftist's quite content with the outcome. It's sufficient to nail Libby for his involvement in Bush Regime dirty tricks, and not that important to get him for the crime of maximum penalty. He was obviously in the thick of a campaign of political retaliation, and it's sufficient to demonstrate that fact in the course of convicting him of lying about it. Justice is served by the truth revealed, not whatever sentence Libby ends up serving in a Club Fed somewhere.

And it's not over. Rove's reportedly still under investigation (news crawls don't generally express much emotion, but the relief in the Fox crawl announcing "Rove not indicted!" was palpable...and premature). The Scooter Indictment details a web of White House officials involved in this, and we're still waiting to learn who "Official A" is. Libby's indictment reads like the teaser for next week's episode, and I think it's likely that the best is yet to come.

Remember, it took more than two years for the entire Watergate story to come out, and it proceeded incrementally, from one underling to another, up the chain. Libby and Rove, Haldeman and Erlichmann...history teaches one patience.