Bad Moter Scooter

We’ve been relatively free of Plame here, and the only scooters thus far have been in a recent review of Quadrophenia, but as you no doubt have heard, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, was indicted today by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. As Glenn Reynolds writes:

Lying to a grand jury is serious, if true. The rest is Martha Stewart stuff. But this isn’t the Libby-Rove-Cheney takedown that the lefties have been hoping for — there’s not even a charge of “outing” a covert agent — and the very extravagance of their hopes will make this seem much less significant.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on what constitutes a feeding frenzy and writes:

Pundits and bloggers, known for the sharpness of their opinions–and, as with sharks’ teeth, such sharpness is often a necessary part of the arsenal of such creatures–need to be careful that, in the group excitement of the fray, they don’t end up destroying more than they intended.

Which is partially why Glenn adds, “If there’s no more [than an indicted Scooter], this will probably do Bush little harm”. Orrin Judd agrees, writing:

This wasn’t an October that the president would have sought, but it ends up going as well as he could possibly have hoped on the 4 issues that had hurt him most.

Read Orrin’s post for the list.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon writes:

It’s obvious too that the Plame Affair is not at all about some minor not-so-covert CIA official, but about Iraq. It is a replaying of the war on other turf. The odd thing about this is that it has always struck me that Iraq could just as easily have been a Democratic Party war. Despite his present ultra-dovish position, Gore, who has often been a foreign policy hawk during his career, might easily have led the nation into the Iraq War had he been elected. His opinions now are dictated, in part, by his current constituency.

That’s absolutely true–but who’s driving the train? To turn your opinions on a dime for nothing more than partisan reasons is hypocrisy of the worst order–and speaking of which, the H-word is a topic Jonah Goldberg explores in his latest column.