True, but keep in mind how much Democrats resisted the idea that Lewinsky “wasn’t about the sex; it was about the perjury.” In other words, be ready for McCain fans to keep saying it’s a sex scandal only.

If they ARE blackmailing everyone, it is the only competent thing they have done since almost no one has called them on it. All it would take is one provably wrong accusation to the wrong guy in congress and the whole thing blows up.

Of course they have a LOT of expertise and experience; (I know I bring this up ad nauseam but) the whole reason my mother was tasked with listening to J.Edgar Hoover’s phone conversations was so he could prove he “never said it THAT way”, so it isn’t blackmail! Since tape recorders were not yet practical, he used a few well controlled and muted humans. She did admit that he made reference to his subject’s “jacket” quite a bit.

How about setting them up? Have a clean congresscritter (if one exists) plant some juicy “admission” on a DNC server ONLY and sit back and wait for the contact. Waxman would be perfect; they have to hate that guy enough to try ANYTHING to stop him. (A little irony comes to mind: JEH’s favorite dirt was that someone MIGHT be a homosexual and used the ACCUSATION to revoke or decline someone’s security clearance!)

and ew: there is no copyright in government works. So to the extent you want to re-post entire DOJ press releases, this law student encourages you to go right ahead.

Interesting point. Imply that St. John has a touch of St. Augustine-the-pagan, that he’s a stud despite his age and exhaustion, in order to prove he has the energy, testosterone and misogyny to be a GOP president. Maybe, maybe not, but it would be plain vanilla reverse character assassination for the neocons.

The McCain/lobbyist “affair” is making local news at eleven. Somebody doesn’t like St. John. Let’s hope the facts speak for themselves, and loudly.

I do think that Addington has to have been working overtime to devise strategies for how to keep thousands of mouths shut after Cheney leaves office. This deserves special tracking between now and the first year or so of Obama’s administration. I suspect that one of the strategies will be to hide delayed retribution among the new administration’s attempts to review and purge the most egregious of the Bush civil servant holdovers.