Perhaps you celebrate Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or maybe you’re observing Ramadan right now.

Whatever the case, for some on the left these days, there’s a new holiday: Fitzmas.

You might not have heard of it. The name is derived from the last name of Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

And the occasion is the night-before-Christmas feeling some on the left are having as they anticipate — and hope and wish and pray — that Fitzgerald will seek indictments against Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and perhaps others in the administration.

Newspaper reports suggesting that Fitzgerald will act soon — he may have done so by the time you are reading this — have sent some into a near frenzy of excitement.

“Did you know that we’re just hours (all right, maybe a couple days) away from FITZMAS????” one featured poster wrote on the left-wing website dailykos.com. “Doesn’t it feel like the hap-happiest time of the year??”

“And ... and ... don’t ‘cha just feel like you’re going to exploooooooooooode?”

Markos Moulitsas himself, the founder of DailyKos, admitted to such emotions a few weeks ago, after a report that Fitzgerald would “signal within days” whether he would bring indictments.

“I get up at around 8:00 a.m. pacific time, or 11 a.m. Eastern,” Moulitsas wrote. “I hope I wake up to good news. This makes me feel like the night before Christmas.”

So if you are afflicted with an intense case of pre-Fitzgerald anticipation, our Fitzmas expert on the DailyKos has some tips for you.

The first thing you should do is to stop — immediately — drinking coffee or any other stimulants.

“For the next 48 hours, cleanse your body of java, aspartame, splenda, and whatever other s- - - you’ve been putting in your system,” the website says. “Your body will be producing more adrenaline during Fitzmas than it did when you were a hormone-crazed teenager, so don’t fuel the fire.”

(Perhaps I should say right now that I am not making this up; you can read this for yourself among the featured articles on the DailyKos.)

Another bit of advice for the overexcited indictment-watcher is to stay away from the computer, at least for the moment. “Resist the urge to press ‘refresh’ every TWO SECONDS. Checking into Drudge every minute won’t make any indictments come any faster.”

And one final tip: “Stockpile the booze. ... No matter what comes down, these next couple of days will be explosive. So chill the Cristal (or the Guinness) and get ready.”

So you’ve cut out the coffee. You’ve turned off the laptop. You’ve bought a bottle of champagne (although you might not want to splurge for that $250 bottle of Cristal, just in case the news is bad).

What do you do now?

Well, you theorize about what those lying you-know-whats in the White House will do when Fitzgerald hits them with criminal charges.

Marshall Wittmann of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which is normally at war with the progressive lefties at the DailyKos, seems, at least at the moment, to be on the same wavelength when he suggests that any indictments will expose the fundamental hypocrisy of Republicans.

If Rove or any other administration officials are indicted, Wittmann writes, then Rove will “unleash the dogs of war against Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“Rove undoubtedly has his operatives in place and prepared to respond if the indictment comes down. The plan of attack has been signed, sealed and ready for delivery at a Fox News outlet in your neighborhood.”

“All of the pack that relentlessly pursued Clinton will kvetch about the ‘criminalization of politics,’” Wittmann continues. “They will see no irony or hypocrisy in their complaint because this is a fight about preserving power, not maintaining consistency.”

Well, if Rove is indicted, maybe he will attack Fitzgerald.

Maybe we will have the entire Lewinsky scandal in reverse.

Or maybe we won’t.

So far, what seem interesting are the differences between the reactions of the two White Houses to criminal probes.

You may remember that the Clinton White House, when faced with the investigation of independent counsel Kenneth Starr in 1998, (a) formed an organized-crime-style joint defense agreement among the various targets and/or witnesses, (b) asserted novel or nonexistent legal privileges that ultimately did not stand up in court and (c) loudly accused Starr of acting unethically and of being politically motivated.

And all of that was when the investigation was going on, before Starr had made a decision to charge anyone with anything.

In the CIA leak case, what is remarkable is the silence from the White House side of the investigation.

Have you seen Karl Rove’s lawyer holding a sidewalk news conference to denounce Fitzgerald?

Lewis Libby’s lawyer?

Anybody else?

Perhaps they’ll change their strategy if their clients are indicted, but so far their conduct has been the precise opposite of Clinton-era officials and their defense teams.

So now, all we can do is wait for Fitzmas.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it