Patrick Fitzgerald, the man behind the Blagojevich case, has institutionalized a disturbing modus operandi. First comes the obligatory press conference where, through leaks and sensationalism, the prosecutor announces his crusade against a Blago or a Scooter Libby or a Conrad Black. A trial in the court of public opinion is followed by a long, drawn-out legal process designed to bankrupt the defendant, who does not have the prosecutor’s publicly generated capital. This is capped off by an underwhelming case that, after weeks of depositions and testimonies, results in something like a perjury conviction as a booby prize when the trumped-up case collapses.

In the Libby case, we saw a defendant charged with a crime that probably did not exist (Valerie Plame was not a covert operative) and, if it existed, was committed by someone else (the more politically correct dissident Richard Armitage, a media-approved Powellite). As for Blago, to the extent that he looked suspicious, it was largely in the context of dealing with Barack Obama’s would-be successor in the Senate, which means that a number of the interested negotiating parties — Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, Jesse Jackson Jr., and perhaps Barack Obama himself — were never really going to be drawn into the case. I could add the Conrad Black case as another example of the formula: pretrial prejudicial publicity, trumped-up charges, and a final flimsy conviction on a lesser count.

When it comes to supposedly non-partisan prosecutors, America seems to see political partisanship as a regrettable misdemeanor but failure to get much-promised convictions as an unforgivable felony. Who polices the police?