No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Not yet.
It's Fitzmas Day in blue-state America, and I don't want to pour cold eggnog on the party, but I know people who are still feeling like all the presents have been opened, and after they'd begged and begged Santa for a Range Rover, all they got was ... a scooter.
They're disappointed that there were only five indictments in the Christmas stocking, all against only one man, a man the administration is distancing itself from as if he were Patient Zero in an avian flu epidemic. And indictments are, still and all, only indictments. If the administration's defenders haven't quoted this line yet, they will by the day's end: the remark by Reagan's labor secretary Ray Donovan, after he was acquitted of corruption charges; "Where do I go to get my reputation back?"
So, Virginia, this is a caution against "irrational exuberance." One White House official has quit, which is like the joke, "What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start." But if there's anything that five years have taught, it's that this administration has a knack for survival -- by any means necessary.
The 2,000th-something U.S. soldier will be killed in Iraq this week. Another Supreme Court nominee -- the devil we didn't know, back when Harriet Miers was the devil we did -- will be pushed forward. The rest of it isn't going away just because Scooter Libby has: the crony deal-making, the squandering of the nation's prosperity, the savaging of its international reputation, the environmental rape-by-any-other-name, the grabby, greedy tax policies, the faith-based policy-making that believes in creationism but not global warming, the leadership that manages to be both inept and sinister by turns -- it's all still out there, and so much more that I'm just too tired of recording it to record it all again.
Even if this round of indictments is just the first shoe to drop, this is the chance for the Democrats to shed the second one, and so far they've shown little sign of even knowing how to untie the laces. They're starting to remind me of someone who never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
So to those who feel shortchanged at getting only a Scooter, don't turn to Santa Claus to cheer yourselves up, but to Ebenezer Scrooge. His Christmas epiphany came only after he was visited by three spirits. You remember them -- the Ghost of Indictments Past, the Ghost of Indictments Present -- and the scariest spirit of all, the one who scared old Ebenzer straight: the Ghost of Indictments Yet to Come.