Get ready...

An excerpt from Pitt's article on Truthout.org :

There have been two bad moments looming over the horizon for the last couple of weeks. One is still in the offing, and a lot of people who have been watching and working the details should prepare themselves for the ram. The other went down this morning, and a lot of good folks are choking on their own rage right now.
One will center around Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been surprisingly diligent and effective in his investigation into who outed deep-cover CIA agent Valerie Plame. His diligence and effectiveness have been surprising, it should be noted, because he has been the only person in government lo these last five years who has actually and sincerely attempted to uncover and unravel the nest of lies, deceptions and bare-faced criminal actions of the Bush administration.
That means, of course, that he has got to go. GOP defenders of Bush, Rove and Libby have been lining up salvos against Fitzgerald should he continue to evidence his unfortunate streak of moral clarity. As Joe Conason reported in the New York Observer last week, "Circled in a bristling perimeter around the White House, the friends and allies of Mr. Rove can soon be expected to fire their rhetorical mortars at Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the White House exposure of CIA operative Valerie Wilson. Indeed, the preparations for that assault began months ago in the editorial columns of The Wall Street Journal, which has tarred Mr. Fitzgerald as a 'loose cannon' and an 'unguided missile.'"
"Evidently," continued Conason, "Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, will lead the next foray against the special prosecutor. This week the Senator's press office announced his plan to hold hearings on the Fitzgerald probe. That means interfering with an 'ongoing investigation,' as the White House press secretary might say, but such considerations won't deter the highly partisan Kansan."
This was to be expected. The word "Irony" was deleted from the GOP Dictionary many years ago, along with words like "Shame" and "Hypocrite." These fellows achieved their lofty status in no small part because of a genuinely loose-cannon investigator named Starr, who burned five years of our lives leaping from land deals to consensual sex in a Puritanical crusade that had more to do with the 2000 election and stalling out an effective Democratic administration than anything else.
Attacks against Fitzgerald won't do a great deal of damage to the investigation, or to Fitzgerald, by themselves. But they will help to increase the volume as we cycle towards the endgame. You see, Fitzgerald's term as Special Counsel expires in October. Former Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald, no relation, intimated in a recent interview that House Speaker Denny Hastert is auguring towards making sure the pesky investigator is not granted an extension of his investigative term.
Can Bush and his congressional allies survive the resulting howls of indignation if Fitzgerald and his investigation are stuffed in a soft-shoe version of the Saturday Night Massacre? Well, considering the fact that they have thus far survived a disastrous invasion of Iraq, 1,796 dead American soldiers, shameless profiteering from corporations umbilically connected to the White House, Enron, tax cuts that eviscerated the budget, and the murder of about 3,000 people in New York and Washington right under their noses, and all that just for starters, the idea that dumping Fitzgerald will do any harm to the administration can pretty safely be filed under "Pipe Dream."
Wrap...