Fitzmas -- Libby guilty on four counts

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. I guess this was published a couple of weeks ago; the Libby verdict just came in today.

In a way, the Beltway's tawdry interest in the "Inside Baseball" bullshit
emanating from the Libby trial perfectly mirrored the Democrats' half-serious
attempts to pass an anti-war resolution. For the portrait of both the Bush
administration and the press corps that is emerging from this trial is that of a
group of craven star-fuckers with their tongues so far up each others' asses
that they scarcely even realized that their high school gossiping was helping to
start a war. Like the Democrats with their legislative dawdling, they were doing
something other than their jobs at the moment of truth and were too stupid to
not be proud of it.
In the end, the jury may be too confused to figure out
whether it was Russert, or Miller, or Bob Novak, or Bob Woodward, or Dick
Armitage, or Karl Rove, or Santa Claus who outed Valerie Plame.
But the
public will conclude that they were all trading stories about Joe Wilson's wife,
and getting off on it, and not one of them thought to step back and realize the
gravity of what they were doing. At each turn both the reporters and the
administration went weak in the knees every time they had a secret to share --
the classic example being Armitage's when he spoke to Woodward about Plame. "His
wife is in the agency. . . . How about that shit?" he bragged.
This image of
overpaid Washington insiders giddy with the game of power politics, using the
lives of eighteen-year-olds as poker chips, is what has inspired so much hatred
and disgust for mainstream politics in the past half-dozen years or so. It was
no accident that the gallery of the Libby trial was filled with correspondents
from the blogging world filing daily reports -- Firedoglake, the Huffington Post
and BlogHer were represented, among others. They had to be there because . . .
well, because there had to be some real reporters there. At least the bloggers
know who they're representing. As the trial showed, no one can be all that sure
anymore about the Washington media, or the dingbat politicians they hang around
with.