Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald dropped his first bomb Friday in a 22-page five felony indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for his role in the outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame, wife of U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

The dropping of Plame’s name to the press was widely seen as retribution for Wilson’s assertion that his trip to Niger showed that President Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium there was untrue.

Still on the bubble is Presidential adviser Karl Rove as Fitzgerald keeps his investigation open. On Friday night as I write this, the airwaves are alive with the battle between President Bush’s supporters and detractors as to how serious all this really is.

It was serious enough, as CNN reports, that several nations backtracked Plame’s contacts in their countries and shut them down. Plame, it must be remembered, was charged with establishing a network of foreign informants who would report on the development of weapons of mass destruction.

The Bushies are saying Fitzgerald didn’t indict Libby on the original charge investigated — knowingly outing a CIA agent — which is true, but beside the point. They are also repeating several other talking points including that Wilson lied in the report on his Niger visit.

You can read all about it here and the debunking of those claims, but we needn’t get bogged down in the obfuscatory spin of the “official source” Bush loyalists.

But what reaction can one expect from the typical American in the street?

I suspect that in most cases, the whole issue is somewhat over-complex for the attention span of the average TV age citizen. Democrats would do well to stick to some basic talking points and repeat them ad infinitum.

Or perhaps only one point: that for the first time in U.S. history, high official(s) of our government conspired to damage, at least partially, our own national security, by destroying the career of one its own loyal intelligence agents.

And for what?

For what they conceived as a higher cause — the cause of war, the cause of oil wealth.

In case anyone still doesn’t get it — the be all and end all of this Presidency is the invasion of Iraq. Not the so-called “War on Terror” — that’s a advertising slogan. The Iraqi invasion and occupation is the axis on which the entire Bush presidency pivots.

If you doubt that, check out Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Daniel Henninger’s piece in Opinion Journal. Both the Harriet Miers fiasco and the indictment of “Scooter” Libby are mere distractions — it’s war that matters and Bush needs to be free to keep the world safe for America’s non-negotiable standard of living.

Similarly, as his Presidency seemingly crumbles around him, Bush, on Thursday, gave one of the strongest rallying speeches yet on the “War on Terror.” All that was missing was the theme music from the movie Patton.

So one can endlessly speculate about Fitzgerald’s still open investigation and where it will all lead. Will it take us to Rome where dummied intelligence reports were procured that backed the President’s assertions that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger?

Will it lead to Rove, who may or may not have been involved in leaking Plame’s identity to the odious columnist Robert Novak (who still, strangely enough, hasn’t been given the “Judith Miller treatment” by Fitzgerald or anyone else)?

Will it lead right to the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where a President and administration lied a nation into war?

And if it does, will the American people, a long way from Watergate, be able to grasp both the complexities of the case and its dangerous ramifications?

Or will all of this be seem by an increasingly jaded, distracted and tired public as business as usual in Washington? Will the hard right, including Bush’s Christian base, shrug off state-sponsored treason in service of its own jihad to remake the world as an American church?

I shudder when I think of what the answer to that may be.

For if Fitzgerald has, indeed, uncovered the basic scheme — retribution against the government’s own agents and damaging the nation’s security apparatus for the sake of falsely laying the groundwork for a war that benefits the few at the bloody expense of the many — then we are finished if this stands.

A nation that allows what could be state-sponsored treason in the service of an administration’s master plan of conquest and exploitation is one that has lost more than its moral bearings — it has lost the legitimacy of democratic government.

This is something I think Fitzgerald understands if no one else does.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...