What do you do if you’re just itching to denounce a smear campaign that doesn’t exist? Why, you just go ahead and do it anyway. In Salon today, Joe Conason writes a column headlined, “Fitzgerald is no Ken Starr: The same pundits who are absurdly smearing Fitzgerald as a partisan zealot were notably silent during the Whitewater disgrace.” With CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation coming to a conclusion that might include indictments against Bush administration officials, Conason writes, “we have arrived at the stage that was always inevitable: a wave of preemptive attacks on special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and his expected prosecutions.”

As evidence of that “wave,” Conason cites two — two — offenders: New York Times columnist John Tierney and, uh, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg. But Tierney, who wasn’t covering the story back in 1998, wrote virtually nothing one way or the other about Starr, and Weisberg, who was not by any stretch of the imagination a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, has simply written an article recently arguing that the Fitzgerald investigation is not a good thing for anyone involved. As it happens, the only person in Conason’s article who has really launched attack after attack after attack on a prosecutor is…Joe Conason. Through many articles and television appearances, and through his book, The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton — which has, among others, the index entries “Starr, Kenneth W., conflicts of interest, appearance of” and “Starr, Kenneth W., the McDougals, pressuring to incriminate the Clintons” — Conason spent much of 1998 and 1999 and 2000 doing to Kenneth Starr what he now imagines conservatives are doing to Patrick Fitzgerald. Perhaps there will be such attacks in the future, but shouldn’t we wait and see?