In the last week the nation has turned the corner on impeaching George W Bush. It has gone from a cry of protest and anger, to being the subtext of what is said and doen at the highest levels of government. The tumblers are whirring, and one by one falling into place. The force of gravity is now on the side of it occurring, rather than it not occurring. Impeachment is a
Trial by Constitution, and the search for probable cause has begun.
The reason for this is that scandals do not happen, they are allowed to happen. Either they are the product of desperation, as a side that is defeated in a political bout grabs for any weapon to use in a last ditch attempt, or they are the product of a general disgust and desire to force out a government that has lost all connection with those it governs.
Once the star of impeachment was only only glimpsed in the distance., now the planets are aligning. Inching closer with each new confirmation that the case for going to war in Iraq was a crude forgery - the "Italian Job"'s source is now established fact, not speculation.
In the last week the nation has turned the corner on impeaching George W Bush. It has gone from a cry of protest and anger, to being the subtext of what is said and doen at the highest levels of government. The tumblers are whirring, and one by one falling into place. The force of gravity is now on the side of it occurring, rather than it not occurring. Impeachment is a
Trial by Constitution, and the search for probable cause has begun.
The reason for this is that scandals do not happen, they are allowed to happen. Either they are the product of desperation, as a side that is defeated in a political bout grabs for any weapon to use in a last ditch attempt, or they are the product of a general disgust and desire to force out a government that has lost all connection with those it governs.
Once the star of impeachment was only only glimpsed in the distance, now the planets are aligning. Inching closer with each new confirmation that the case for going to war in Iraq was a crude forgery.
The Unspoken Act
Lest anyone doubt that impeachment is the subtext of what is said and done at the highest levels of power, let me quote from Senator Harry Reid's statement before a rare Rule XXI hearing in the Senate:
The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really about: how the Administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.
As a result of its improper conduct, a cloud now hangs over this Administration. This cloud is further darkened by the Administration's mistakes in prisoner abuse scandal, Hurricane Katrina, and the cronyism and corruption in numerous agencies.
And, unfortunately, it must be said that a cloud also hangs over this Republican-controlled Congress for its unwillingness to hold this Republican Administration accountable for its misdeeds on all of these issues.
There are all the elements for impeachment: high crimes and misdemeanors and the need for public accountability. His language echos a poll of Americans that had 50% saying they favored accountability through impeachment "if Bush lied to go to war in Iraq".
Bush's poll numbers continue to set new lows continuing a slide that began, virtually the day after the elections of 2004.
A Crisis of Economy
Scandals don't happen, they are allowed to happen. the US leading economic indicators continue to lag and consumer confidence plunges. even as asset inflation and borrowing drive GDP growth. Inflation is eroding savings, and it is eroding earning power. And worse still, it is in the volatile march of gasoline prices which briefly touched the sky, coming with in a few points of the real highs in 1981.
With economic numbers being lost in a fog, the difference between the paper economy and the real economy is as large as it has been at any time since 1979. People don't like to freeze in the dark. And an economy that, during a boom phase adds only 46,000 seasonally adjusted payroll positions is one that isheaded in the wrong direction.
The long term economic crisis can be summed up in a simple phrase: we are repeating the mistakes of the late 1920's, when wages were allowed to erode, while easy credit masked the loss of buying power. The short form of this is that we have deflation for what Americans sell, and inflation for what we buy, and we are borrowing to hide the difference.
This crisis in the economy is producing a crisis in the budget. While it is not widely discussed is that this crisis is about to kick off massive tax increases targeted at Democratic areas of the country. The deeper problem is that there is a lack of investment supply. This is being called a "global savings glut", in the same way that Garfield the cat used to say "I'm not overweight, I am under tall."
This means that unless the Republican Congress is slowed down, and the country given something else to focus on, there is massive economic damage coming for the bicoastal economy, which has been floated on the housing bubble, even as the basis for its economic prosperity - high tech jobs growth, exports and investment supply creation - have been destroyed by the Bushconomy.
Crisis of Government
George Bush's policy ideas when coming into office were two fold: bail out the idiot investing class with massive tax breaks so that they would not be hosed down by the crash of 2000, and invade Iraq to give America cheap oil to run the sprawlconomy: knock down trees, put up houses. Great for the red states, and for the disorganized working class - the core of Republican populism.
The problem is that Iraq is falling apart. According to Republicans Iraq should be Texas annex, and a very polite society, since it is so well armed. The reality is reconstruction was behind schedule a year ago and has a deteriorating security situation,. With the US dependent on mercenaries. The GAO has scrubbed its report on how much Iraq would cost, so embarassingly off were the figures.
The reality is that Iraq is a huge dry hole, gone are the enormously optimistic estimates that Iraq is another Saudi Arabia. This should be no surprise, they came form the same sources as the wildly inflated estimates of Iraq's pre-invasion WMD capacity.
Instead of being a buoy to the economy, Iraq is a vast sink. A sink that is about to be paid for.
This is on top of reconstruction in the wake of Katrina and Rita, and the host of other problems which were allowed to slide during the obsession with Iraq. This is a failure of basic government policy. Recessions are the time to allow "creative destruction" to take hold, and use the lowered costs of materials and manpower to address long term structural problems. We build infrastructure during the down turn, not just because it keeps people employed, because that is the cheapest time to do it.
Crisis of Legitimacy
The public voted for all of this carnage. The public gave this President 90% approval ratings for allowing Arabs to fly planes into buildings. This decade is going to be the reverse of the 1960's - the joke about the 1960's was that if you remember them, you weren't really there. This decade will be one that, if you were really here, you won't own up to remembering them. The public, particularly the conservative and moderate public, is desperately scrambling for an excuse to deflect responsibility from themselves. They weren't greedy fools who bought a pig in a poke and sat idly by as America marched to an illegal war funded by robbing their grand children. Americans simply will not accept the enormity of their arrogance and stupidity. They need a way out.
With the weight of history staring them back in the face, they have to find someone at fault. Someone whose criminal actions lead them astray, because only in that way can Americans continue to live with themselves as a people. Can you imagine anyone being asked by a child "so daddy what did you do at the turn of the century?" and saying "Oh I voted to have a bunch of thieves and war criminals loot 3 trillion dollars and drag the country into a spiral of economic and political decay by raping the constitution darling." And yet that is what the country did.
At this point Americans must believe that some exceptional circumstance caused them to make the wrong decision. This means they must believe that either force or fraud compelled them to act as they did. On the left, that means an obsession with ballot boxes - even though the rigging of elections generally does not involved rigging the vote counts. That's force, the excuse that "we did enough to stop Bush, but the election was stolen". 2000 was, but 2004 was not - the Republicans bought that one fair and square.
But moderates will no more face the idea that our election system is unreliable than they will face the reality that our monetary system is crumbling - they will, instead, prefer to believe that someone lied to them. And that someone must be at the top of he political heap. To assuage deep guilt, and deflect responsibility, the person sacrificed must be proportional to the guilt to be expunged - so much Hyam Maccoby's The Sacred Executioner tells us. That means that Scooter Libby - porn novelist pal of Cheney - is simply nowhere near large enough to take the fall for the American public. Nor is Cheney. Only one person is the symbol of all that has gone wrong. And that is the President himself.
The reality is that we are on the verge of a new constitutional order, the system of consensus which held up the Liberal Democracy is broken. That system has yet to be replaced, even though we are, piece by piee, building a new, and more parlaimentary, order to follow it
The rest of the story is simply America saying "nice doggie" while they search in the dark for a rock.