Fitzmas! Martin Luther Fitz Day!

Or, actually, just the beginning of a long trial where Scooter Libby will try to stay out of jail by any means necessary.

The estimated six-week trial will pit current and former Bush administration officials against one another and, if Cheney is called as expected, will mark the first time that a sitting vice president has testified in a criminal case. It also will force the media into painful territory, with as many as 10 journalists called to testify for or against an official who was, for some of them, a confidential source.

Besides Cheney, the trial is likely to feature government and media luminaries including NBC's Tim Russert, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, columnist Robert D. Novak and Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward.

It's important to note that this trial has little to do with who leaked Valerie Plame's name and CIA status to reporters, but has everything to do with how Libby knowingly lied to the grand jury to cover up his role in the outing. That's the charge, and despite all the spin you'll hear from the right and from the defense, that's all the prosecutor has to prove. Clearly, the trial will wade into some other territory and shine a light on how the White House has operated over the past six years, especially in the run-up to war.

Libby goes on trial in U.S. District Court here today, charged with lying to a grand jury about the conversations he had with Russert and other reporters and, in the process, obstructing a federal investigation.

His defense is a novel one: that he was so preoccupied with life-or-death affairs of state that it affected his ability to accurately recall events for federal investigators.

Prosecutors have a simpler explanation: He lied.

The "faulty memory defense," as U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has called it, is just one intriguing aspect of what promises to be one of the most remarkable trials in Washington in years [...]

But mainly, Libby is betting on what one lawyer calls his "busy man defense." Walton has said that Libby plans to use "a dizzying panoply" of information to make the point, including CIA-scrubbed summaries of classified information.

"The defendant anticipates using 'dots' on a PowerPoint presentation to show that during the time period critical to the indictment he was presented with several hundred other pieces of classified information," the judge said in an order last month. The defense is unusual because Libby is in essence admitting that he may not have told the truth, which lawyers said is a risky gambit in perjury cases, where defendants usually argue that what they said was technically true or that they were confused by the questions posed to them.

They said they could not recall another case where it had been tried in court, although it has been tried in the court of public opinion. In the 1980s, President Reagan denied trading weapons for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair, but later recanted when confronted with evidence that he did, citing a memory lapse.

Some experts said Libby runs the risk of appearing to believe he's above the law.

"A D.C. jury is quite likely to have its share of people with lower-level government jobs who don't take kindly to self-important claims that the press of business makes it unnecessary to focus on precisely what one says to government investigators and in the grand jury," said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who teaches criminal law at Fordham Law School.

The first week will be concerned with the arduous task of trying to pick a jury. Unsurprisingly, the defense will quiz the jury on their politics, a sad reminder of where we've come over the years. It used to be that Democrats or Republicans could be trusted by the other side to understand where the truth is and reach a decision based on it. The defense obviously believes that they are so persecuted that only like-minded individuals represent a jury of their peers. That's a depressing moment for the country. I hope that all these politicians arguing for a "new kind of politics" understand that the "old kind" of partisan viciousness comes from moves like this, where citizens asked to do their civic duty in a jury trial must be questioned on their political leanings.

Firedoglake and Marcy Wheeler at The Next Hurrah, as well as others, will be covering this trial from the courtroom, and I'll be following along.