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[Pirate Smile]

It's hard not to see Fitzgerald as the possessor of authentic traditional American virtues. Fitzgerald deals in facts, and lets facts speak for themselves. Bush talks ceaselessly of faith. The prosecutor is all about substance, the president all about surface. In nominating his personal attorney to the most august thinking body in the land, the Supreme Court, the president was caught showing the dismissive view he's always held of intellectual depth and scholarly accomplishment.

Fitzgerald's noir mystique was only strengthened this week by news accounts relating that in contrast to the rapier focus of his mind, Fitzgerald lives in a bachelor apartment with old socks stuffed in the desk drawer and three-month-old lasagna stiffening in the oven. Remember how in the first year of the Bush II presidency there was constant promotion of this administration's crisp corporate values? New-broom indicators like the CEO starting every meeting on time and retiring to bed at 10 p.m. were supposed to signify that personal discipline was a sign of intellectual rigor. But an empty desk can sometimes mean an empty head, one that's comfortable only with spoon-fed executive summaries and filtered "coverage" instead of self-processed information.

"It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy," Wilkerson wrote in his startling blast against Bush. "But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide."

Republicans have been searching for a handle on Fitzgerald. They are trying, seemingly unconsciously, to offload onto him their own bad faith left over from the Clinton impeachment fiasco. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's shameless display on Sunday's "Meet the Press" was the cake taker. Hutchison had the gall to blandly rabbit on about overzealous prosecutors and perjury just being an itsy-bitsy crime. The narrative of Clinton's impeachment is being replayed, only this time without such incidental grotesqueries as a thong-snapping intern and a prissball prosecutor leaking like a fire hose and the recourse to churchy lines like "sex isn't the issue, the issue is lying." It's one thing to say, "If he'll lie about sex, he'll lie about something important." But what if the thing being lied about is already important? For Democrats, the prospect of indictments coming down feels like poetic justice for five years of cynicism and sanctimony.