"The silence can be like thunder."

Washington abhors a vacuum. That's what makes Fitzgerald's investigation such a fun diversion to behold. Will he indict? Will he pack his bags and go home with nary a statement? Why did he just put up a website, 22 months into the investigation? No one outside of his team of prosecutors and FBI agents knows.

So into that void steps speculation and, above all, spin. Never mind that the spinners don't even know what they're supposed to be spinning. Spin they must. And since they have nothing from Fitzgerald on which to launch their spin, the agenda is laid bare. It's like watching sausage get made.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - With a decision expected this week on possible indictments in the C.I.A. leak case, allies of the White House suggested Sunday that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor.

[...]

On Sunday, Republicans appeared to be preparing to blunt the impact of any charges. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program "Meet the Press," compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."

Ms. Hutchison said she hoped "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

President Bush said several weeks ago that Mr. Fitzgerald had handled the case in "a very dignified way," making it more difficult for Republicans to portray him negatively.

But allies of the White House have quietly been circulating talking points in recent days among Republicans sympathetic to the administration, seeking to help them make the case that bringing charges like perjury mean the prosecutor does not have a strong case, one Republican with close ties to the White House said Sunday. Other people sympathetic to Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said that indicting them would amount to criminalizing politics and that Mr. Fitzgerald did not understand how Washington works.

On the contrary, if he didn't know how Washington works when he started this investigation, I think our man Fitzgerald -- after looking into the dealings of Libby, Rove, Miller, and the dozens of other media bigshots with favored access to this administration -- certainly understands it now. And besides, who knew Republicans were such moral relativists? I thought that was one of the crimes of liberal academia.

And on the other side is the growing meme that Fitzgerald's dogged and fair.

"He's that really strict judge that everyone fears, not because they think he's going to do the wrong thing, but because they're afraid he might do the right thing," said the source, who has ties to the White House and requested anonymity.

"As White House staffers," he continued, "you had generals and Cabinet secretaries being deferential to you. He didn't care what you'd done or how well you knew the president."

I don't know about you, but the "Martha Stewart defense" falls pretty short in comparison with that.