In The New York Times this morning, Frank Rich gives us his best effort at the "Watergate redux" argument:

To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took "responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."

 On the same page David Brooks says the exact opposite:

On March 21, 1973, John Dean told President Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency. There was, Dean said, a metastasizing criminal conspiracy spreading through the White House.

Thirty-two years later, Patrick Fitzgerald has just completed a 22-month investigation of the Bush presidency. One thing is clear: there is no cancer on this presidency. Fitzgerald, who seems to be a model prosecutor, enjoyed what he called full cooperation from all federal agencies. He found enough evidence to indict one man, Scooter Libby, on serious charges.

So who's right? Let's just put it this way, Brooks is writing about the facts as we know them and Fitzgerald's own declaration that the"substantial work" of his investigation is done . Rich is speculating (and fantasizing) about what might be in the future based on nothing more than his assumption that Bush is Nixon and Cheney is Agnew.

Another must-read piece of the puzzle is Matt Cooper's new column in Time Magazine. Cooper says the only thing Mr. Libby did was respond to a question by by him about Joe Wilson's wife working at the CIA with the phrase "yeah, I heard that too." It seems insane that Libby would grant waivers to all of the reporters in the case allowing them to testify about conversations with him before the grand jury and then go in there himself and purposefully lie.  Cooper seems mystified by this as well:

I was surprised last week that the Libby indictment even mentioned me. But apparently his recollection of the conversation differed from mine in a way that led the prosecutor to think he was lying. As for me, I still have no idea if Libby or anyone else has committed a crime.