It’s been interesting, to say the least: reading the right-wing apologentsia on the Valerie Plame affair. It’s too complicated; it “doesn’t make sense.” It’s only the Bush haters, looking desperately for anything to hang on his administration. And they’re demanding a standard of proof that was lacking for even the most lurid of anti-Clinton allegations. After all, these people are the ones who brought morals back to the White House.

Remember this?

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!” As a reporter, you get around?curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events?but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. “Come on in.” And I did.

…..Kristol notes that “the kid is what he is, and he?s different from the father, some differences that I feel good about,” but that gray men around “41″ who don?t approve of “43″ have trouble criticizing the son to the father “and ascribe everything to Karl?s malign influence.” In that, Rove is at the center of the most portentous father-son conversation of modern times. Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.

The Bush family - and associates - are famous for retribution. Does that really have to make sense?

I was also thinking this morning about my late ex-husband, with whom I shared a passion for all things Watergate. He was a true idealist, and was deeply shocked at the extent of the dirty tricks in the Nixon White House.

He wasn’t a yellow-dog Democrat, either. In college, he’d voted for Goldwater. When George H.W. Bush first ran for the Republican nomination, he briefly switched his registration in order to vote for him in the GOP primary.

Last December, I was sitting in his hospital room as he lay dying. He was extremely weak and short of breath; he spoke rarely, and with great effort. But he managed to tell me how relieved he was that Trent Lott had resigned. “This country deserves better than that,” he said. “The Republicans should be ashamed of themselves.”

I was thinking about that this morning, and I was thinking about the many upstanding, moral Republicans I’ve known - people I think of as “old-school” Republicans. These were the kind of people whose honest indignation finally turned the tide against Nixon and forced him from office. If there’s anything to this story (and odds are, there is), we can trust those people to make common cause with us.

Now, I know this isn’t anywhere near as serious as a blowjob, but I wonder if the mouthpieces of the extreme right wing will manage to rouse themselves to the same state of high indignation they sustained throughout two Clinton terms.

As someone once said, the American people deserve better.