The much-anticipated political holiday that many in the bloggosphere were calling Fitzmas has come and gone, and you can color yer old pal Jerky distinctly unimpressed. I think a pale shade of grey should do it. <br><br>It was one week ago, after two weeks of speculative clit-flicking by America's buffoonish journalistic establishment, that Special Prosecutor Patrick "the Bulldog" Fitzgerald revealed the fruits of his two year investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame by White House officials. And what spectacular fruits they were! "Big" Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Irving "Scooter" Lewis Libby Junior indicted on two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements (which, to yer old pal Jerky's untrained legal ear, sounds a lot like perjury), and one count obstruction of justice. <br><br>I don't know about you, but yer old pal Jerky didn't exactly shoot hot loads of mansap down his pants-leg over the slim pickings Uncle Fitz left in our collective fireside stocking. Yeah, sure, it's great that Scooter -- a typically perverse neoconservative who spends his free time writing novels about ten year old girls getting raped by bears in Japanese brothels -- was forced to resign. Future historians will no doubt have a swell time memorizing how this most corrupt of presidential administrations was the first in 135 years to have a sitting White House staffer be indicted for federal felonies. <br><br>And yet, even despite assurances that the investigation goes on, I can't help but feel as though we've just been shuffled from Purgatory to Limbo. It's like we've all been standing in line for two years, only to find out that our destination was the ass-end of (SURPRISE!) another fucking line. <br><br>If there's anything more pathetic than watching the journalistic Big Boys break in to their regularly scheduled programming to breathlessly report on three-year-old news, I can't imagine what it is. You say Dubya told Arab leaders that God ordered him to invade Iraq?! You say this administration is sabotaging its own intelligence agencies for some nefarious reason? You say there's a chance that the White House might have knowingly led the nation into a disastrously mismanaged invasion under false pretenses?! <br><br>Hey, thanks for blowing our minds, Anderson Cooper. <br><br>Meanwhile, tucked away in a shadowy hyper-dimensional vortex some call TEH OBVIOUS!!1!!, some of us have known all this for years. Just like we knew that Scooter was involved in outing Valerie Plame since February of 2003, when the Preznit gave his word that he wasn't. <br><br>Which brings us back to Patrick Fitzgerald, the Ashcroft-appointed Republican prosecutor who suddenly found himself in the curious position of bearing all the hopes and dreams of America's shell-shocked liberals on his shoulders. Even if the guy was as clean as his reputation, he was still given a Sisyphean task, akin to transferring two tons of dog turds from a public beach to a faraway composting center, using nothing but a rickety old shopping cart. Don't ask how that analogy works; you're gonna have to trust me on this one. The point is, it's all theater. <br><br>Look at how he handled Judith Miller. He put the New York Times' star reporter in jail for a few months, and now she's out, free to write a book about her "principled stand". By now, it has become all too obvious that she opted for a short sit rather than revealing the part she played in the closed circuit conspiracy that helped shepherd America into the Shadow of the Valley of Death. How brave and noble is that?! <br><br>Sadly, the futility of the exercise hasn't stopped some hopelessly optimistic observers from trying to discern possible future impeachment routes in Fitzgerald's indictment. Stirling Newberry's Talmudic parsing of the documents provide one example. And then there's the Times' own Frank Rich, squealing: "Here it comes, maaan! Just you wait and see! They'll be getting theirs soon enough, maaan! This whole rotten pumpkin is about to be kicked wide open!" <br><br>How soon they forget the Enron debacle, and Cheney's secret Energy Taskforce meetings, and the manufactured California energy crisis that resulted from those meetings, and the ongoing censorship of the Abu Ghraib Picture Show, and the two stolen elections, and a couple dozen other theoretically administration-toppling scandals that have all been successfully pantsed and shoved head-first into the toilet by these cackling throwbacks to every nerd's worst high school nightmares. <br><br>The pathetic truth of the matter is that this criminal cabal has been getting away with murder for years, and they're probably going to continue getting away with it. <br><br>So what if Fitzgerald uncovered the fact that Libby first learned of Plame's CIA status from Dick Cheney in the weeks before Bob Novak outed her? Both these comic book villains had full intel clearances at the time, so no crime was committed. Nyah-nyah! <br><br>And who cares if, as has long been rumored, those notorious forged Nirgerian uranium documents were the work of rogue elements within the American intelligence community? US District Judge Reggie Walton -- a right-wing Reagan appointee who dutifully followed Cheney and Ashcroft's orders to gag 9/11 FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds -- has already been assigned to the case. Thus, the Mighty Right Wing Media Wurlitzer has every reason to feel confident as they continue spewing lies into the gaping mouths of their fish-like disinformation consumers. <br><br>And Hank can continue to link to them, even though I suspect he knows better. <br><br>No, nothing happened on Fitzmas worth getting excited about. You'd only be setting yourself up for a fall. Even if Karl Rove's mysterious last minute maneuverings hadn't succeeded in temporarily extricating his fat neck from Fitzgerald's dangling noose, Thursday's announcement would have been anti-climactic. <br><br>Ahab didn't give a shit about Flipper. He would settle for nothing less than thrusting a razor-sharp harpoon into the vast, thundering heart of the Great White Whale. And me? The only thing that would satisfy me now was if Fitzgerald got out a butcher's knife, hacked and slashed his way through flesh, flab and bone, and at long last exposed the black and shriveled heart of the criminal conspiracy currently occupying the Captain's Quarters of America's ship of state. <br><br>Because (and I mean this sincerely) that's probably the only way we'll ever get to find out who really killed JFK.<br><br>(longer, links-filled version available at my blog,
www.dirtfiles.com) <p></p><i></i>