quiet for now

Looking around the blogosphere, speaking generally, the left is focusing on Fitzgerald's investigation and the right on the unfolding Miers debacle. Those on the right probably don't want to draw more attention than necessary to the impending indictments, and they've apparently got their hands full upholding the flag of conservatism after Katrina and with Iraq not going well, but mightn't this neglect to try to lay the ground of public opinion for the (potential) indictments be a misjudgment?

I watched Chris Matthews and his guests on one of the Sunday network shows for about 10 minutes, and the level of discussion on this issue that the pundits felt was appropriate for national consumption was very low. They were bringing up points that had been discussed in the blogs and op-ed pages months ago. This tells me that the American public has no idea what is about to happen. Perhaps the Bush administration feels there's not much it can do at this point, and defenders of the administration may not have much in the way of a substantive response to the findings of a prosecution led by a Bush-appointee which the president himself repeatedly endorsed. But this has the potential to eclipse everything that's gone wrong so far: Miers, Katrina, Iraq, Social Security. Where's the famous Republican attack and slime machine? (aside from this rather lame attempt from Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison) I guess it's about to be indicted.

Caveat: Looking more closely, I see that National Review Online has been making some attempts at preparing the defense/attack, but not very successfully. This article gets bogged down with comparisons to Clinton/Lewinsky, which will certainly be discussed heavily once the grand jury acts, but is not all that relevant to the matter at hand. This one goes off on the journalists involved, but as you can tell from the fact that the strongest attacks on the journalists are coming from the left, this tactic is not going to help much.