Impeach the President?

It’s funny. I turned 44 today. Various and sundry body parts are starting to malfunction and I’m almost certainly at or past the half-way point of my life. If I should be morose about anything today, it ought to be my impending slow-motion demise. Mortality issues.

SIDEBAR: It’s not so much the dying I mind, it’s the inevitable, undignified, uncomfortable process of falling to pieces physically that I’m not looking forward to. But as I started that particular process early in my life (Bleeding ulcer at 24? Check!), I’m kind of already in the groove. I’m not gonna make it, but that’s okay. Nobody else is either (with the possible exception of Lemmy from Motorhead).

But having yourself a cute little Man Cub underfoot… It’s like all of a sudden I got a stake in this game. A dog in the hunt, in the parlance of our Confederate friends to the south. It’s less of a race to the boneyard now and more of a “hey, slow down and check this out for a minute.” Of course, the irony is that stopping to check some shit out will definitely hasten your way to said boneyard, but I digress…

I turned 44 today, and I don’t want to write a paean to The Missus (I got Mother’s Day coming right up to do that) or go on forever about how cute The Man Cub is becoming (the fact that his first word, repeated ad infinitum without much variation except for emphasis, is “blah”), or even how Goddamned tired I always am and how my work has been suffering for it recently. No. Not today.

Today I want to bitch about the President!

How sad is that?

I blame myself. I know better. I know The Last Boy Scout would rip me a new one for wasting this opportunity for proper Commie-lib navel-gazing and he’d be right.

But damn it, this is going to be my son’s life we’re talking about here. And say what you will about W, his is no Caretaker Presidency, like Clinton’s or his dad’s – this is a Change the Paradigm Presidency. And that makes it worthy of consideration and discussion, even on this one day a year set aside for me to receive presents without having to give any in return.

Did you like how I titled this post “Impeach the President?” with a question mark?

It’s a little trick I picked up in the newspaper trade. You can get away with anything in print if you garnish your accusation with a question mark. “Fang Bastardson a Lying Sack of Shit?” Well, maybe. As long as you add the question mark, you have just the right amount of technical wiggle room. It’s the same thing as starting a sentence with, “Some people have said that…”

Your best option is to go with a combination of the two. Check it out:

Have some people suggested the President be impeached? Yes, they have! Neil Young, for one. He even wrote a song about it, and he’s gonna make sure you get a chance to hear it.

Other people of the same mind can be found online at Impeach The Motherfucker Already. Actually, sites are beginning to proliferate exponentially and I can only hope it's all in good, clean fun.

Because somewhere earlier (in some other post I'm too lazy to link to) I pointed out that an impeached Dumbleyou will leave us with a pissed-off, power-mad Cheney in the Big Chair. If my fellow liberals would slow down and take a deep breath, they’ll see that impeachment is a baaad idea. I’ll say that again, on its own line:

Impeaching W is a BAD IDEA. Let me tell you why.

One, “President Cheney.” Just typing the words makes my gums constrict and my sphincters flutter.

Two, W is too stupid to rise to the qualifications of impeachment.

As I understand it, impeachment has to proceed from a basically treasonous act. And by treason, I mean a deliberate, conscious attempt to cause harm to the country by means of treachery. Although he scores high on harming America, I really don’t think W was trying to fuck America as badly as he has. His wasn’t a conscious, deliberate attempt to harm America. Remember, he really thought we were gonna be greeted like Superman at the Daily Planet when we rolled into Baghdad.

Three, if we impeach two Presidents in a row, it sets a horrible, bad, scary, dangerous precedent. One is an anomaly, two is a pattern. Unless we want to turn the occupant of the oval office into a perpetual Suspect-in-Chief, we should wield this impeachment weapon carefully.

Was the Clinton impeachment a farce? Hugely. If W deliberately leading us into a war on false premises doesn’t meet my impeachment threshold, you can imagine what I think about the threat posed to our country by lies about a consensual sex act. But impeachment can’t be used to take revenge, no matter how yummy that might feel in the short run.

Come on, think as Americans now, not angry partisans. America is much more about today and tomorrow than it is yesterday. And we’re gonna screw up our tomorrows if we keep heading in this direction. We do NOT want a short-timer Cheney with his finger on the button, especially right now with Iran wagging its uncircumcised nuclear cock around in our faces. Who knows what else is on Cheney and Rummy’s “To-Do” List?

And W is doing a pretty good job of screwing up our tomorrows without us helping him, anyhow.

So cut it out. Let’s talk about impeachment and rattle their cages, keep the dialogue anti-Bush, fine. Keep the tide turning away from his administration’s stupidity. But let’s not actually start the process, even if we win the House back in November.

I have a much better solution: in the event we win the House back, investigate the fuck out of the whole rotten bunch of them. Investigations ARE the proper tool for extracting political revenge! The Bush gang's list of investigation-worthy chicanery is long and laudable, from Cheney’s secret energy-tycoon task force meeting to Iraq to Katrina to Wiretapping to whatever they’re up to this afternoon.

And whether or not we win the House back this year, as soon as Bush is out of office, I believe he should be tried for war crimes in the International Court. What we’ve done by invading Iraq and allowing it to plunge into bloody chaos, and how we did it, are questions legitimately worthy of investigation by a sanctioned international body.

So let’s not impeach Bush – please! – but let’s at least hold him to the same standards as Saddam Hussein is being held to.

That would be an awesome birthday present, whenever it arrived.