Given the relative traffic stats, most people here do not also read Eric Alterman's Altercation at Media Matters, so many of you missed a fine rant today by Charlie Pierce about the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime.
Pierce argues convincingly that the ever-growing U.S. attorneys scandal, in particular Comey's bombshell testimony, has changed everything.
Here's a taste:
Impeach him. Impeach them all. Start chucking people into the hoosegow for contempt, and as material witnesses. Stuff this White House so full of subpeonas that it bursts. Blow this government apart.
More great Pierce rant, below.
The strategic argument against impeachment, though it comports with the Beltway media conventional wisdom, has some merit -- it will be seen as too like the meritless DeLay impeachment of Clinton; there will never be 67 votes in this Senate for conviction; there are other ways to discredit the many crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime, etc.
Pierce is no dummy, and recognizes the political problem:
I held off on this because I thought the process was both legally unjustifiable and politically futile. I believe it is still the latter.
The difference is I don't care any more that it is.
The Comey testimony -- coupled with the astonishing arrogance it takes simply to ignore congressional subpoenas as though they were something someone slipped under your windshield wiper -- pushed me all the way over the edge.
Pierce then outlines a basic bill of anti-Constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors that should be obvious to the mainstream media, which shamefully campaigned for impeachment over a blowjob, but are somehow invisible now:
The president spied on Americans and thereby broke the law. Repeatedly.
The president was told he was breaking the law by members of the Department of Justice who had no reason to lie to him on the subject. (John Ashcroft noticed, for pity's sake.)
The president knew he was breaking the law so he sent the White House chief of staff and the White House counsel out to behave like Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction. (Sorry, Andy Card. I liked you when we were both young and ambitious in Massachusetts, but it's off to Allenwood for a spell until you come clean.)
The clean-up crew failed, and he kept breaking the law anyway. Repeatedly.
They spied on their political opponents. They used their steroidal view of executive powers to justify it in their tiny little minds. That's what they're hiding.
I have no doubts any more that the administration has committed more crimes than we know.
And every day they remain unpunished -- hell, every day they remain in office -- we become more deeply complicit in their offenses. It's time to govern ourselves again.
But Pierce recognizes that political roadblocks to accountability for clearly impeachable executive crimes persistently exist:
This can't be a matter of political calculation any more. It simply can't. It's a fundamental question of what kind of government we want to have. Yet nobody of any clout in the Democratic Party wants any part of it.
snip
And the Republicans -- as demonstrated by the performance of the Ten Little Idiots trying to out-butch each other the other night -- are utterly hopeless.
So, impeachment, even of serial perjurer Abu Gonzalez (who probably won't last the month anyway), is not in the cards.
Though I agree with Pierce, and millions of other dirty fucking hippies, that it should be.