The Libby Verdict: Guilty on four charges of perjury and making false statements to the Feds. Sullivan and Drum react.

The conventional wisdom that Libby will draw out the appeals until after the 2008 election so he can get a pre-inaugural pardon from George Bush before he leaves office is probably correct, but it hardly matters. Libby doesn't seem like a guy who's going to rat out his superiors anyways, so the prosecutor's ability to get him to turn state's evidence is diminished, a reality Fitzgerald seemed to recognize at his press conference after the verdict. Since the only reason for Libby to lie the way he did in the first place was to protect Dick Cheney, anyone with an IQ in double digits can deduce that this whole controversy resulted from the Veep's desire to cover up his role in the fabrication of pre-war intelligence.

By itself, that's impeachable. We don't need Scooter Libby's testimony in some future criminal case to make that stick. Pardoning Libby will be the final nail in the coffin of the Bush Administration's historical legacy, that of a cabal which stressed certitude in the face of doubt, at the cost of many thousands of lives and, potentially, the greatness of the American experiment.