The nutroots may be celebrating their long-awaited “Fitzmas” tonight, but it’s pretty weak tea compared to their fantasies of “Rove being frog marched out of the White House.” And they can’t take much comfort from Fitzgerald’s comment that the investigation is essentially over. Also, people should be reminded that Joe Wilson is still a liar, regardless of Scooter Libby’s fate:

Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address…

…The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson’s bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

In the end, the only crime was Libby’s alleged perjury. Well, and the fact that the media for so long promulgated and continued to provide oxygen to the loony left conspiracy theory that this was “retribution” against Wilson by the White House.

I agree with (former federal prosecutor) Andy McCarthy:

I don’t think there ever should have been an investigation in the first place. The Justice Department should quickly have realized that the facts here did not warrant a prosecution under its standards for the espionage act or the agent identity protection act. DOJ, under intense political pressure from Democrats and the anti-Bush media, did not close the investigation and kicked it to an independent prosecutor, but the most culpable person in this mess is Wilson, and I wish no one had been charged if there was no legal way of charging him. The administration had every good reason to refute Wilson