I've seen this batted around a little bit but haven't been able to find anything too fleshed out, so I figured I'd give it a try for my first diary.
Anyway, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Bill Kristol are aggressively selling Plamegate and Tm DeLay's own troubles as partisan attacks on conservative ideology. The point being that those evil liberals are unable to do anything concrete so they're forced to rely on the court system as a backdoor means of influencing elections. Besides the surface level "sour grapes" it also plays into their idea of a hopelessly screwed up justice system plagued with frivolous charges.
The fun part, however, is that this theme could play beautifully into the hands of Democrats in the mid-term elections as Plamegate and Delay's various trials play out, along with the eventual indictments for the Abramoff scandals, Frist's misadventures, and who know what else lurking around the bend.
If Kristol, DeLay, and others keep repeating the "They're criminalizing conservatism" meme, it could well backfire on them as more convictions and indictments start rolling in. Nancy Pelosi and a few others have been playing around a bit with the "Culture of Corruption" idea and this could play wonderfully alongside the "criminalizing conversatism" idea if they can be successfully conflated.
Basic idea being drum up the Dem theme more to paint the Republican party as the "Culture of Corruption" then frame "You're criminalizing conservatism" alongside it. As the indictments and convictions keep rolling in, Dems can just chalk it up as more proof of the Culture of Corruption and paint the conservative movement as criminal. As Atrios said on his site, the more often the words "criminal" and "conservative" appear together, the better for us.
As they grow together, it becomes easier to paint the standard MO of the Republicans as necessarily criminal; Tom DeLay is taking up the badge of conservatism to defend himself by arguing that what he's doing is perfectly normal conservative politics. If he and others are convicted after arguing that they're just doing normal conservative politics, then normal conservatives really does become criminal.
The quick equation: Conservative = Tom DeLay = criminal. Once this gets established, they start losing elections in a hurry and this can be hammered all the way through the inevitable trials leading up the 2006 mid-terms. Eventually, you can argue "If conservatives are all criminals, then yes, we're criminalizing conservatives," and the label may be as tainted as the word "liberal" is to some of the more problematic Dems.
I know none of this is rocket science, more just a collection of thoughts, but I figured I'd try to get it started.