Now that it is starting to look as though Patrick Fitzgerald might indict somebody, the effort to blacken his reputation has begun. It's being led by Richard Cohen, Victoria Toensing, Mary Matalin, and William Kristol, all of whom appear to think that now is the time to be sock puppets for Karl Rove and company.

Here's firedoglake:

firedoglake: A Little Soft Shoe to Start?: And so it begins. The pushback at Patrick Fitzgerald has already started, before charges have even materialized for anyone involved in the Traitorgate mess. A little softshoe, testing the waters to see what works, what grabs hold and resonates, what will be a good set of repeated catch-phrases and talking points for the Rush crowd and dittoheads.It started with a little testing of the waters by Victoria Toensing, Mary Matalin and hack-columnist Richard Cohen last week, a little hint here, a little dig there.

"He's lost his mind," Toensing tossed out on Hardball.

"He should go back to Chicago and not bother with petty criminal charges like lying to investigators or lying under oath," Cohen said....

[T]his post... on Bullmoose....

What is more sad though: that the attack dogs will not attack the charges based on their merit... that the first reaction is always, always to go after the prosecutor personally.... It isn't surprising, after all, that this would be the means used by Karl Rove and his buddies. We saw this very sort of smear in South Carolina in 2000, after all, when John McCain trounced W in New Hampshire's primary.... His response was not to fight it out on the merits, on the ideas, on the things that actually make a difference to the American people and their day to day lives. No, his response was to wallow in the gutter -- to begin a whisper campaign that McCain had fathered an illegitimate mixed-race child, when, in fact, McCain and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi orphan.

What sort of person tries to smear a man with his act of decency? Ask Rove. It's been his MO since he cut his teeth in politics...

But why this focus on Rove? The first cause is not Rove, but Bush. The cossacks work for the Czar.