"Who do you have to blow to get impeached around here?"

[StefanX]

http://www.thepoorman.net/2007/05/20/who-do-you-have-to-blow-to-get-impeached-around-here/

Charles Pierce:

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.

... 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. 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. ... 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.

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.

Yes. President Bush is a very bad President - maybe the worst we’ve ever had - and he has set a number of very bad precedents about lifting the Executive above the law which we all hope the next President will not follow. That is half the problem. The other half of the problem is that, for six years, the Congress let him get away with it. Now a Democratic Congress is giving Bush a hard time, writing sharply-worded letters and such, and that’s certainly an improvement. But if we continue along like this for the remaining 18 months, the precedent we are going to set is that the President can do whatever the fuck he wants, and break whatever the fuck laws he wants, torture anyone he wants, and that the Congress checks this unlimited authority by making sure that nobody sucks the Presidential pee-pee. This isn’t a workable system of government.