One Senator's 'technicality' is another's 'high crime.' Oops, same Senator, different year.

Even while the President has called the investigation into the Plame leak, 'serious,' some of his Republican allies have started taking shots at Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Of course, this has always been part of their defense, to attack anyone who dare question them. This is why the whole Plame issue has come up in the first place.

Over the weekend, Republicans launched a pre-emptive strike against possible charges for perjury.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas derided any potential perjury charge as a "technicality," and suggested Fitzgerald may be trying to show that "two years' of investigation was not a waste of time and dollars."

Other Republicans with close ties to the White House suggested that Fitzgerald was looking at perjury and obstruction charges because he was having trouble proving that officials knowingly leaked the identity of a covert operative.

So now Senator Hutchison thinks that perjury (lying under sworn oath) is a 'technicality.' If that is true, then why did she vote to remove the President of the United States from office in January 1999 on an article of impeachment that accused him of committing perjury?

I guess it's only a technicality of Karl Rove is lying under oath, about matters of national security. But if Bill Clinton is lying under oath, about sex, then it is the most serious matter to come before the Senate in over a century, since the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial in 1868.