Not to piss on anyone's parade, but I don't think this is the time for parades. Sorry.
Question: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
Fitzgerald: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person -- a person, Mr. Libby -- lied or not.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone's who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
Fitzgerald is not on our side. He isn't on anybody's side but the law's--in a sense the only side he's on is America's. He's not Santa Claus, he's not a Hurricane, he's not a saint, he's not our savior. He's doing his job, and admirably. You could make the case the guy is a hero, but he shouldn't be regarded as a hero only to opponents of Bush. You could call him a hero to America and national security, especially given his prior work investigating Gotti, Ryan, Daley, and Bin Laden. But from what I know about the guy, I reckon he'd probably rather not be called a hero either.
Now I'll be drinking champagne tonight (actually, probably tequila, but close enough right?) like everybody else. But: to continue the baseball analogy that Fitzgerald used today, even if the pitcher did something wrong deliberately, you don't have a parade when he gets ejected. The guy he hit is still down on the ground. Now, when he's able to get up and take first base, or when he returns from the DL, then it makes sense to celebrate. All this is obviously IMHO so take it with as many grains of salt as necessary (even a lime too), and if you desperately need something to celebrate, I can't stop you. Can't really blame you, even. But please, try to at least be respectful enough of the gravity of the situation that we don't have a distorted view of who Fitzgerald is, what he's doing, and what that means for our country.
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The Democrats now have a very solid advantage going into the 2006/2008 cycle, due to the crushing combined weight of Bush Admin missteps, malfeasance, bumbling, graft, corruption, mindlessness, lawlessness, arrogance, incompetence, and hubris. I want to do a diary soon to sum up--Declaration of Independence style--our list of grievances against King George. It's going to be a very long list....