What the Libby verdict was really about

Time Magazine's Michael Duffy makes it rather obvious:

From the start, the case was only marginally about Libby. What was really on trial was the whole culture of an Administration that treated the truth as a relative virtue, as something it could take or leave as it needed. Everyone knows now that Bush and Cheney took the country into a deadly, costly and open-ended war on flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Congress went along. And yes, the public on balance supported it. But no one was more responsible than the Vice President for pushing the limits of the prewar intelligence that did all the convincing. And when former ambassador Joseph Wilson questioned the credibility of that intelligence — and the motives that helped polish it — it was Cheney who led the fight to bring him down.

Republican lawmakers must be furious each time the Vice President goes out on the stump and makes outrageous comments, like the kind he made about Democrats this week.  Incidents like that make it more difficult for the GOP to get its message across.  All Cheney gets them is negative publicity.