Woah. Patrick Fitzgerald is a Badass

Probably find out he had consensual sex with another adult or something.

THIS Monday's New York Daily News printed a delicious bit of character assassination: "He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things." No, this was not yet another vacuous actress moaning about George Bush. It was a "White House ally" describing Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who is leading the investigation into who leaked the name of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, to the press.

[T]he Republicans suffer from three handicaps that could turn any campaign against Mr Fitzgerald into a farce.

The first is that they are starting too late. [..] The Republicans have been excessively nice about Mr Fitzgerald, who was appointed by a Republican official [..]. James Comey, the deputy attorney-general, introduced Mr Fitzgerald as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree and a sense of humour". Mr Bush, to his credit (and completely unlike Mr Clinton), has insisted on the seriousness of the inquiry; only the other week, he praised Mr Fitzgerald for handling the case in "a very dignified way".

Second, Mr Fitzgerald is no Ken Starr. Mr Fitzgerald is as apolitical as Mr Starr was partisan. When he registered to vote in New York, Mr Fitzgerald registered as an independent only to discover that the Independents were a political party, so he changed his registration to "no affiliation" [..]. [..]

Mr Starr, a conservative and a God-fearer who sang hymns on his morning jog, was a ready-made bête noire for the left. Mr Fitzgerald embodies everything that conservatives ought to admire. He is the son of Irish immigrants who worked his way through Amherst and Harvard Law School [..]. He is a workaholic who made his reputation prosecuting gangsters and terrorists, starting with the Gambinos. (In good Godfather fashion, he even had a witness flown in from Sicily.) He convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings, travelled to Africa to investigate the embassy bombings of 1998 and brought the first American indictment of Osama bin Laden.

The third handicap for Republicans is that their arguments during the Lewinsky affair may be thrown back in their faces. How can they moan that Mr Fitzgerald has broadened his inquiry well beyond the original leak, when they supported Mr Starr's leap from dodgy land deals to oral sex? How can they say that perjury and obstruction of justice are technicalities when, during the Lewinsky affair, they declared that "perjury and obstruction of justice are high crimes and misdemeanours" (Senator Bill Frist) and that "perjury and obstruction of justice are crimes against the state" (Senator Sam Brownback)?

Some Republicans, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas on "Meet the Press", a Sunday chat show, argued that perjury was equivalent to a technicality if there was no underlying crime. Mr Fitzgerald responded in a press conference on Friday that people who work undercover for their country need to know that they will not be unmasked lightly, and that when they are unmasked it is crucial that officials cooperate with an investigation. Failing to do so was a breach of the public trust.

Eg, here's one Republican Senator already setting himself up for ridicule under point 3 of the article above - how can perjury now suddenly be a mere "technicality", if it was presented as such a capital crime by his party's leaders just a few years ago?

Quote:

Some Republicans, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas on "Meet the Press", a Sunday chat show, argued that perjury was equivalent to a technicality if there was no underlying crime. Mr Fitzgerald responded in a press conference on Friday that people who work undercover for their country need to know that they will not be unmasked lightly, and that when they are unmasked it is crucial that officials cooperate with an investigation. Failing to do so was a breach of the public trust.

(source)