Chris "I kiss Bush's ass" Matthews has this to say:

If there was law-breaking, it came out of the vice president and his people's determination to protect themselves against the charge that they led us into a corrupt war, a war based on false pretenses.

That's how hot this thing is.

If there are indictments, they're going to be probably in the vice president's office, they're probably going to come next week and they are going to blow this White House apart.

It's going to be unbelievable.

Apparently he's channeling Cindy Sheehan.

On a more calm note, Howard Fineman, usually a reliable voice from the Right, has this to say:

George W. Bush rose to power on the strength of a disciplined, aggressive, tightly focused, leak-proof spin machine — one that took issue positions and stuck to them, divided the world (including the media) into friends and enemies, and steamrollered the opposition with ruthless skill while the candidate remained smilingly above the fray. Sure of his social skills but not of his speaking ability (let alone his ability to speak extemporaneously), Bush (and Karl Rove) learned to stick to their bullet-item talking points, to operate through surrogates, all the while steering the initial course they had set for themselves.

But the machine they built may have run amok — at least that seems to be what Fitzgerald is examining, as he looks at the leaking of Plame’s identity and of other classified information.

In essence, the Bush-Rove campaign machine was redeployed in the service of selling of the Iraq war and, later, in defense of that sale. Did they go over the line in doing so? We’re about to find out.

In the meantime (and in another twist on the poetic justice them), the very discipline of the machine itself — its short internal supply lines, the consistently followed talking points, the focus on feeding friends and obliterating enemies — could be helping Fitzgerald. Tightly knit groups rise together, but they fall together. If the inner circle is small, it takes only one insider “flip” to endanger the rest.

If the cowed media of the last five years is saying all of that, what can there be out there?