I wasn't a big impeachment fan until the last few days....Then this nonsense started. Bush is going to veto SCHIP which has relatively large bi-partisan support. It's a good, fair, just policy that is probably the only decent legislation to come out of congress in the last 6 years. That's just ugly. But not unusual. There is still the horrific violation of civil liberties with the continued suspension of Habeaus Corpus, the eviscerated FISA program and the off the books crap that is certainly happening with extraordinary rendition which has not yet been formally repudiated and, of course, the detainees at Gitmo who live in a kind of sense deprived vacuum. That's bad and ugly and impeachable all by itself. But is it enough to pull the trigger?
For me? Yes! For you? No?
Okay, well then, maybe what's impeachable is the absolute disregard that this administration has shown toward the only 'governmental' lever left to heft the great dead and stinking rot the executive branch has created and anxiously protected over the last six year?
Congressional oversight.
First the refusal to testify honestly from the head of the Department of Justice down through nearly every single one of the political appointees there.
Then there's the Libbie trial refusal from Rove, et. al. Cheney's stonewalling on everything from his stovepiping activities to this energy commission to merely finding out who the hell is on his staff. This is all really bad and worthy of impeachment. Period.
But even so maybe you're not ready to pull the trigger because you knew what the Republicans were all set up to say: "It's all political" in their uniformly ignorant and arrogant castrati whines.
But finally there is this: since the murder of at least 11 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors in Iraq, aides to Secretary of State Rice have notified Henry Waxman that
she herself will not testify about Blackwater or about Iraqi corruption inquiries pending before the committee. (In addition, other officials at State have refused to answer questions in the corruption inquiry unless the committee agrees not to disclose their answers.)
Despite this, Waxman has scheduled a Blackwater hearing for October 2 and requested that Blackwater founder Erik Prince testify.
Looking at this from a contemporary perspective, this strikes me as ongoing murder for private profit; paid for with our tax dollars, being protected by the Executive branch. In short, it's a Mafia operation.
So, yes, I think impeaching our Executive branch for acting like a bunch of muderous Capos is perfectly in order. Not only that, it's efficacy doesn't really matter. You go after the Capo di tutti capi because he's the freaking Capo di tutti capi. The point isn't political anymore. It's to stop the freaking operation, Capisci? Can we please get this going?