Impeachment: It's Not Just For Adulterers...

I’ve had a political rant bubbling around in my head for about a week now…

These days, American government is like a bad case of hives: crazy-making and torturous, and you don’t know which itch to scratch first. It’s nearly impossible to focus enough on one bad thing to compose a coherent rant. In 6 ½ years, the Bush Administration has screwed up everything it has touched. And it’s not just that they have failed to make lemonade out of the lemons handed them by 21st century global dynamics. Mr. Bush and his partners in crime have actively scoured the globe grabbing lemons, only to turn them into the most corrosive acid.

"Partners in crime." Not simply a colorful euphemism, but legitimate, literal truth. Crimes have been committed by the Bush Administration. Crimes against humanity—the White House cavalierly espouses the theory that torture and other blatant human rights violations are perfectly legitimate tools in the "Good Guys’" arsenal. Crimes against the American people—the Administration has taken every opportunity to chip away at our Constitutional rights in the name of providing "security" for a frightened, overwhelmed, and tractable electorate. Crimes against the world community—pre-emptive war? Elective war? Call it what you will, the Bush Administration is guilty of initiating violent action against another sovereign nation, of the type heretofore soundly and righteously condemned by the United States of America.

Bill Clinton was railroaded to impeachment on the basis of one weak, nearly negligible "crime:" One ill-advised lie offered in answer to a question that should never have been asked. How can it be, then…how can it be that this charlatan who currently squats in the Oval Office can offend and re-offend and offend again—huge offenses about things of tremendous import—and we simply allow him to go about his business unmolested? Let’s face it: the man lies nearly every time he opens his mouth. That is, when he somehow manages to communicate a coherent thought. How can we tolerate it? Where is our moral outrage? Did we exhaust it all on Bill Clinton’s much juicier sexual escapades?

Anyone who lived through the tedious, never-ending media circus that was the Clinton impeachment trial is most certainly loath to see the nation dragged through a similar septictank less than a decade later. Much easier, I think, to rationalize that the Bush Administration is suffering from terminal lame-duckness and has less than two years to live anyhow. But every day brings another sound bite of our ridiculous caricature of a bumbler-in-chief sticking his foot in it yet again. This latest tug-of-war surrounding his veto of Congress’ war-funding bill—played out against the backdrop of "Gonzales-gate"—is nothing if not irrefutable proof of Bush’s determination to do as much damage as humanly possible every day he holds on to that office.

All those folks who have been screaming "Impeach! Impeach!" since before the last election… Even I believed that they were a little too strident, a little too drastic, a little too over-the-top. But with each passing day, the idea of impeachment becomes a little less outrageous. In fact, I’m starting to understand that it may be the only way to keep this idiot/madman from perpetrating unnumbered new and original atrocities before his fingers are pried off the keys to the kingdom.

Tags: Impeach Bush