The I word

Really, while I’ll be the first up in line to see the motherfucker hang in The Hague (even despite my views on capital punishment), I think the last thing that should be on anybody’s mind right now, at least publically, is impeachment. First of all, that would mean President Cheney. True, they could impeach him as well, and the idea of President Pelosi does seem rather appealing to me. But really, I can’t see impeachment at this point not being seen as a petulant backlash for what happened to Clinton. While the electorate has become shrill enough to reject two more years of the same, most Americans still haven’t even been fully convinced of the sheer depths to which the gross criminal negligence and incompetence of this administration extend, let alone their sheer self-aggrandizing jeopardizing of our country’s future to pursue their own reckless agenda.

Rest assured, I certainly do think they deserve to be kicked out of office. I also think the threat of impeachment, as it is a very realistic threat, can be privately wielded as a threat to scare the administration away from doing any retarded shit, like trying to invade Iran. But publically supporting the measure right now, even if it were successful, would launch an age of partisan bickering which would make the brouhaha over Clinton’s blowjob look like the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in comparison, and the Democrats won’t emerge as the long-term winners, even if they do succeed at impeaching the president and vice-president.

Democrats would be fucking retarded if they forgot even for a second that the reason they were elected is to get us out of this quagmire, and not to play politics. Find out what the Bush administration and their cronies in Congress did wrong, yes — but also do all the shit they weren’t doing for the last twelve years. The election wasn’t so much an endorsement of Democratic policies as a rejection of Republican ones, and the Democrats would be foolish to forget that.

What I think should be pursued instead of impeachment is a series of of full Congressional hearings into the matter of wrongdoing by the administration, of which plenty will be unveiled. And if that swings the American people to support the measure of impeachment by an overwhelming margin — as I think they would if they were made aware of the full truth — then that's just the icing on the cake. They just have to be allowed to come to that conclusion by themselves. If Democrats start the impeachment bandwagon now, they’ll rightly be seen to have cynically manipulated the political process, and for a party that has staked a large part of its reputation on being above that kind of shit, that would be a very grave mistake indeed.