Digby does a quite good job with the apparent reprieve from prosecution newly received by Mr. Rove.

His piece raises in my mind the question of why many Republicans were so quick to denounce Joseph Wilson, aside from some errors in his account of his Niger trip for the CIA. In Rove's case, we are told, the complaint was that Wilson's criticism was "politically motivated." To hear many Republicans tell it, in fact, the problem with many intelligence community professionals, State Department officials, essentially disinterested government scientists, and various other career civil servants, not to mention a motley collection of judges, human rights activists, and journalists, is nothing more than the fact that "they're Democrats".

Their wide array of specific criticisms of the administration need not be examined on their merits; all one needs to know is that they have a political affiliation different from the administration's, and the facts vanish into irrelevance in the estimation of these conservatives. Every Democrat in public life, on this account, is by implication untrustworthy. The absurdity of such a claim is self-evident, and even the White House would explicitly discount such an interpretation. In practice, the Bush obsession with loyalty combines with ideological fervor to produce an insular, power-hoarding, suspicious, secretive, and ineffective governing style that ought to presumptively disqualify the administration's close congressional allies from receiving the electorate's trust in upcoming elections.

To be sure, the problem is not merely partisanship, because president is apt to shrug off just as readily serious criticism from Republican sources, such as Richard A. Clarke, Clark Kent Ervin, or numerous military officers. But the Democratic office seekers aren't merely ignored; they pay politically for opposing the president, regularly finding themselves smeared for offering serious, reasoned criticisms. Most of what one hears about "Nancy Pelosi" or "Howard Dean" or even a conservative like "John Murtha" consists of dramatic invocations of these individuals' names, as if their identity is more important than what they have to say and their reasons. This tactic needs to be countered and called out, because it only works when we surrender to these expressions of instinctive mistrust and ridicule, which in practice amount to mere intimidation. In no way do they constitute an argument. Although Rove sometimes offers arguments, of course (albeit of a crude, boilerplate variety), he and his cohort are perhaps just as likely to rely on vague generalizations, labels, and innuendo about the fact of critics' and opponents' being to the left of the White House, and therefore "politically motivated."

When you manage to look at these tactics for what they are, they seem risibly shallow, and thoroughly susceptible to being parried by a tough, focused progressive politics. We need not be done in by bluster. You might say that if that's the best they've got, they haven't got much. Remind people: Bush and friends govern based on that same attitude; it's a mindset that defiantly attacks liberal partisanship, but that seems to disdain dialogue, empirical research, and other norms of professionalism at least as much.