Remember our helpless rage at the apparent withering of Plamegate

before the midterm election? Before all those new sex scandals popped up we were hoping fore a public Rove roast, or at least an Armitage execution to help our electoral chances. Well, the Plame case is still wending its way through the criminal court system as Armitage's graymail defense slowly comes apart, and there will no doubt be one or more civil cases as well. I think this whole mess is gonna pop up again, but this time with a Democratic Congress it will be playing in an atmosphere laden with all sorts of revelations about other Republican nastiness, and will be just one more dose of ipecac to help purge the public of its taste for conservatism for a long, long time.

As it takes its place in the larger scheme of things in public awareness, the Plame affair may, in fact, be very useful in helping people to understand how the Bushies scuttled honest intelligence operations (e.g. Brewster-Jennings) when those operations got too close to their nefarious activities. That is, when placed in the context of all the other scandals, things that once sounded tinfoily take on an aura of believability.