TreasonGate - The Implosion of a Political Dynasty

Right after Matt Cooper agreed to testify to the TreasonGate grand jury, and Judy Miller was cuffed and perp walked to a federal agent's car, there were a lot of progressives scratching their heads and saying: "Well, what's next? This sure drives the Downing Street Memo off the front page."

At the time, a few of us were screaming into the void that TreasonGate and the Downing Street Memo were all part of the same ponzi scheme. TreasonGate wasn't about Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, per se. It was a smaller subset of a much grander scandal - the completely bogus selling of an illegal war; the unilateral (for all intents and purposes) invasion of a sovereign country based on prepackaged lies and deciet. And more importantly: the cover up after things went terribly wrong.

Frank Rich has written an absolutely stunning column for Sunday's New York Times. He takes the concept that many of us were promoting in the aftermath of Judy Miller's ride to the lockup, strips it down and crafts it into a fine piece that should - in an ideal world - set the wheels in motion for introduction of Articles of Impeachment first thing Monday morning. Here's a brief excerpt; you simply must read the entire column:
I plucked out the last sentence in the above excerpt on purpose. One word - "timeline" - is the reason that Rich and every other reporter worth a damn has started paying very close attention to TreasonGate. They're finally doing what the blogosphere has done so well over the past 18 or 24 months. They're "timelining" the scandal, which is a fundamental exercise in any crime investigation or (gasp) investigative journalism. And each rock they turn over inside of the boundaries of the timeline reveals a whole new bunch of worms for the Bush cabal.

After the election last year, a lot of depressed progressives were wailing lamentations about another four years of the Bush regime. The more pragmatic among us counseled that the Bush Crime Family, even though they snuck through the election in whatever manner they did, were juggling too many running chainsaws. It just seemed so analogous with Nixon. Watergate was blossoming prior to Tricky Dick's reelection in 1972, but it wasn't until later that the entire house of cards came crashing in on him.

So, I'm finally convinced that we're now watching, in real time, the implosion of a political dynasty that will ultimately rival the downfall of Richard Nixon both in actual scope, and the ultimate fate of the protagonists.