I've seen people brush up against this in some of the open threads, but I have yet to see anything concrete so I figured I'd put up a diary.  This could potentially be a wonderful bit of framing if people can pull it off.  Specifically, I'm just trying to collect a bunch of ideas from this thread and put them in their own diary.

Various Republican talking heads have been parroting the idea that because Libby wasn't indicted for an actual crime but rather lying during the investigation of the crime as part of the cover-up, that it somehow exonerates him.  Fitzgerald himself made a comparison to kicking sand in the face of the umpire, but there's an even more obvious comparison and one that's potentially much more damage if the frame can stick.

Here's the frame: Why not start referring to that Republican talking point as "The Al Capone Defense"?

I've seen this batted around a little bit but haven't been able to find anything too fleshed out, so I figured I'd give it a try for my first diary.

Anyway, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Bill Kristol are aggressively selling Plamegate and Tm DeLay's own troubles as partisan attacks on conservative ideology.  The point being that those evil liberals are unable to do anything concrete so they're forced to rely on the court system as a backdoor means of influencing elections.  Besides the surface level "sour grapes" it also plays into their idea of a hopelessly screwed up justice system plagued with frivolous charges.

The fun part, however, is that this theme could play beautifully into the hands of Democrats in the mid-term elections as Plamegate and Delay's various trials play out, along with the eventual indictments for the Abramoff scandals, Frist's misadventures, and who know what else lurking around the bend.