the * i * word

From Wingnut-ville:

We're already seeing rumblings of the Next Big Thing for the Democratic Party. It's the I-word....impeachment. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) It makes sense, doesn't it? Democrats are still mad about the impeachment of Bill Clinton. They want a little revenge. So how are they going to do it? What evidence could they possibly have to even think about starting any such proceeding against George Bush?

What's making the rounds is a Downing Street memo from 2002 (10 Downing Street is the official prime minister's residence in Great Britain, for those who don't follow such things.) In this memo, which was drafted by a foreign policy aide to Tony Blair, it allegedly includes minutes from a July 2002 meeting where Tony Blair allegedly admitted that the Bush administration fixed Iraq intelligence in order to go to war. Oh boy...this is a doozy! It's the smoking gun....George Bush is doomed! Well, not really.

I happen to agree the Downing Street memo is not a smoking gun. At it's core, it is one person's impression and little more. But I'm for anything - anything whatsoever - which serves to garner attention on the crimes of the Bush Regime.

If a smoking gun is what one is after, might I point to a little place called Iraq? That's the thing about the brazen George W. Bush: His crimes are conducted largely right out in the open under the guise of normalcy, an illusion recreated each day by a toadying corporate media which exists solely to protect America's corrupt power structure. And normalcy, by definition, is not an impeachable offense.

Like Hugo Zoom, I concur Republcians have set the bar for impeachment so low as to render it virtually meaningless - that is, at least to the Constitutionally-minded among us - but it still matters to them. Maybe that damn Democratic Party Progress Scale really does work.

What Neil Boortz's little monkeys would have us believe is that no one but those patchoulli donning, Birkenstock-wearing lefties support impeachment. So check out what Ronald Reagan's Assistant Treasury Secretary, himself a highly decorated member of the Flying Monkey Right, has to say about impeaching King Bush:

A Reputation in Tatters

George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States.

America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable.

As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush’s far more serious lies. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America’s reputation, caused 1 billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting.

Abundant evidence now exists in the public domain to convict George W. Bush of the crime of the century. The secret British government memo (dated July 23, 2002, and available here), leaked to the Sunday Times (which printed it on May 1, 2005), reports that Bush wanted “to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . . .

Paul Roberts is obviously more than a little concerned about the long term impact a possible Bush Backlash could have on his party. I can't allow myself the level of optimism required to ponder such a phenomenon, but it's nice to see a conservative reaching for the club.