From the Department of Not Going to Happen

I admire Dave Lindorff for his unrelenting opposition to the increasingly authoritarian, warmaking state, and for his tenacity in demanding accountability for the numerous members of the Bush crime gang. And while he is right about what ought to happen, this will remain in the realm of fantasy:

The one good thing that can be said about the Gonzales resignation is that it eliminates the Democratic leadership's latest gambit for attempting to derail the impeachment movement. As support for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney has grown, both among the public at large and in Congress, where there are now at least 20 co-sponsors for Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Cheney impeachment bill, the Democratic leadership in the House scrambled to get behind a purely inside-the-beltway "campaign" to impeach Gonzales - a move that did succeed in dividing the real, authentic impeachment movement.

The interesting thing is that in backing the impeachment of Gonzales, those leaders and senior House Democrats who have been brushing off the broader impeachment movement gave the lie to two of their main arguments against impeachment - that it would be "too divisive" and that there "isn't time" for impeachment. Clearly if it wasn't too late to impeach Gonzales, and if impeaching Gonzales would not be too divisive, neither is it too late to impeach Cheney and neither would impeaching Cheney be "too divisive."

So let's hail the departure of Gonzo, let's demand a thorough vetting of the demonstrably incompetent and unprincipled Chertoff, and most importantly, let's move forward with the campaign to impeach Cheney, starting with a full-court campaign to get all those who so readily signed on to Washington Rep. Jay Inslee's Gonzales impeachment bill to now sign on to Rep. Kucinich's H.Res. 333, a resolution to impeach the vice president.

This Congress will not impeach anyone. Nope. Not gonna happen.

Besides, something else rather more monumental is going to happen. Oh, yes:

It is.

Will the Democrats oppose the next chapter in our endless war? If you ask the question, you haven't been paying any attention at all.

Of course, if the Democrats had any convictions that were genuinely opposed to the corporatist, authoritarian, warfare state, they would begin impeachment proceedings against both Bush and Cheney immediately upon Congress's return in September (and they would have begun them months ago) -- because impeachment is deserved 1,000 times over in both cases, and because such proceedings might make an attack on Iran less likely. That would also assume that the Washington Democrats had some strategic smarts.

Democrats with deeply held convictions that impelled them to principled action that was not guaranteed to be successful, and clever about the implementation of a plan -- one that didn't directly concern an election -- that demanded their careful attention for more than a week or two? Excuse me for a moment.



Sorry. I had to collapse to the floor in helpless laughter for a few minutes, and then slowly pull myself back up so I could get to the keyboard.

The attack on Iran will now almost certainly happen, probably in the next six months or so. All the rest, no.

Time for dinner and a drink!