With closing arguments through in the bogus Libby Circus, a few odds and ends and outright misconceptions still abound. Via JOM:

“Bitter Recriminations (Ongoing)

Jeralyn Merritt on the Libby trial:

In the end, this trial must be ruled by the presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt. The charges the Government brought against Libby are narrow and specific as to the exact statements about which he allegedly lied. In the end, no smoking gun was introduced to establish Libby lied as opposed to being mistaken. That lack of evidence presented must be held to work against the Government.

The smartest thing the defense did at trial was not to put Libby on the stand and subject him to what surely have been a withering cross-examination by Fitzgerald. The dumbest thing the Government did was charge too narrow a case and not indict Cheney along with Libby.

In other words, Fitzgerald missed the forest for the trees. Maybe he thought the case wasn’t there. But in charging such a stripped down version solely against Libby, I have to believe at least one juror, like me, will have a reasonable doubt and refuse to convict.

Hung jury or outright acquittal, then. A bit more:

Will I be disappointed if there’s an acquittal? Yes, but in Fitzgerald, not the system. And if there’s a conviction? Then I’ll be disappointed in the Judge, for refusing to allow a memory expert to testify at trial. As much as I might prefer it otherwise, this case was about memory and reasonable doubt, not about the conspiracy that was proven to exist at the Administration’s highest levels of power.

Merritt, like the rest of the left can’t help but spin this yarn of reprisal that was never proven, thus prop up the case that was never there.

Again, for the chronically ignorant or stuck in denial, Fitzgerald didn’t indict on the outing of a covert operative because there was nothing to indict on - Plame simply wasn’t covert.

Secondly, there was NO proof of any conspiracy on the part of the White House, but a gross misapplication of law in saying that it’s a crime for a Presidential Administration to correct lies and distortions (the proof of Joe Wilson being nothing short of a cheap liar has absolutely been proven), and their right to set the record straight.

The Bush administration, or any administration has the right and the responsibility to correct misinformation and in this case they should have went farther and charged Valerie Plame and other parties involved in what was a proven conspiracy to commit treason during a time of war.

The entirety of this circus of “Who told who what and when” was a smoke screen which is why Senator Chuck Schumer moved so fast to request an investigation to throw off the dogs so to speak, so that the real conspiracy behind Plame’s (and the CIA’s) “offering up her husband” could find the light of day.

That is the great story yet to be fully told.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn:

“Some of the American people think the real scandal is not that Richard Armitage leaked the name of the wife who landed Joe Wilson the Niger job but the fact that she landed him the job in the first place. What that reveals about at best the carelessness and at worst the corruption of US intelligence on the critical issue of the day is very dispiriting. Yet that section of the American people also have no legal redress.

So the emptiness of Fitzgerald’s argument exposes the essentially political nature of his case. The Wilson story – in which one man publicly inserts himself into the biggest foreign policy debate of our time, inflates and mischaracterizes his role in it, and then demands legal action against those who dispute his self-inflation and mischaracterization – should be self-parodying. Instead, even after it was clear there was no underlying crime, even after the Senate report, Lord Butler’s report and every other investigation rejected Wilson’s version of events, Fitzgerald went ahead and prosecuted for what his own summing up makes plain is a political dispute over a matter of current debate.

The criminalization of politics is for banana republics.”

UPDATE II: More from the editors at National Review, on the case that should have never been, and is now, “Case Closed”