Charles
Pierce subbing for Erica Alterman on Media Matters does a good job of voicing the reasons for impeachment:
For the past
couple of weeks, they've just gotten blatant about it. The administration of George W. Bush is bound
by no law, bound by no precedent,
bound not even by the forms of democratic self-government, let alone its actual substance, which is being
used as a throw-rug in John Yoo's
den these days. They will torture and the Congress can do nothing. Their powers to spy, to
search, and to seize are unlimited and Congress is not remotely entitled to know even what those
powers are. They can imprison without
trial. They can force corporations -- and, indeed, individuals within the government -- to violate the law.
They are not subject to treaties.
They are not subject to oversight, nor even subpoenas. Read this swill from
yesterday. Through
his actions, and from the mouths of his minions, George Bush is now claiming fully the powers of
a tyrant, by any reasonable definition of the term.
This is the
only issue in the presidential campaign. It is the only truly
existential threat to the country.
Everything else -- health care, climate
change, campaign finance, the deficit -- mean nothing if we fail on
this fundamental issue. I
don't know where the two Democratic contenders fall on this stuff --
their campaigns have
been damnably vague about it -- but
I know John McCain will be immeasurably worse. His anti-torture bill
allowed torture. His
"compromise" on judicial nominations allowed the Democrats to maintain
the right to filibuster
as long as they promised never
to do so. This allowed Roberts and Alito to skunk through in order to
deface the constitutional
order, likely for the rest of my lifetime, and McCain has promised to
let a theocratic loon
like Sam Brownback to help him pick
his own judges. He's always had a sweet tooth for executive power; his
line-item veto was so nakedly
unconstitutional that even William Rehnquist noticed. And, yesterday,
he got up in front
of the CPAC crowd that earlier had
cheered every single one of the steps toward tyranny that the
administration had undertaken. A while back,
MoveOn.org said unkind things about
a soldier in a newspaper ad, and the entire capital got the vapors. The
Congress of the United States
was moved to resolve to condemn the newspaper
ad. Democratic politicians rushed to sign on. Now, a group of very
obvious extremists -- Dick Cheney is an authoritarian bully and a
personal coward. His
approval rating is 19 percent in the country and 100 percent in that
hall. Res ipse loquitur. --
gathers in Washington, and not only
do the party's most prominent political figures truckle and beg, your
liberal media puts the worst
of them on the air, as if they were serious people and not simple
public vandals. Jesus
Christ in Air Jordans, what in hell
was David Bossie, a thug and a hoodlum, doing on Jim Lehrer's program
last night? Tom DeLay is
under indictment, for pity's sake. Why was he on MSNBC, grinning at
Chris Matthews and
lying about climate change? Mitt
Romney's speech was a sprawling landfill of demagogic swill. It was
treated as, well,
statesmanlike by people who believe that John McCain is not
conservative enough. This is plainly
nuts, and any respectable conservative
would work tirelessly to wring these crackpots out of the movement
before the whole mess goes over the
cliff again. Somebody should, you
know, take out an ad or something.