Outside the Spectrum

   It’s over.

   The long, national nightmare is over. When some kids ask me one day what it was like to live through the presidency of George W. Bush I’ll say “Well, the guy was a conceited son of privilege who spoke English like it was a second language and who had an ugly financial history and who dodged the draft. When he got the Republican nomination in 2000 I said he was the least qualified candidate that party had nominated for the presidency in modern history. When he won I said the democratic process of this country was badly broken. He proceeded the lie about everything he did and every government program he proposed or oversaw. He put lobbyists in charge of government offices charged with overseeing the industries they had just lobbied for. He put Mike Brown in charge of FEMA. He lied about intelligence to convince the country to go into Iraq. Some people in his administration (maybe with his approval) betrayed the identity of a CIA agent who just happened to be married to an outspoken administration critic. The Republican-controlled congress either refused to investigate these things or dragged their feet on investigating the intelligence scam. Then, after it was revealed in a newspaper article, the president admitted to wiretapping people in the United States in 2002 without ever getting a warrant, and he said he’d continue to do so.”

   My story would end there. The listeners would know about the rest, the spectacular collapse of Bush’s administration.

   I just listened to Ed Schultz on Air America radio. Barbara Boxer said she was sitting next to John Dean, the former Nixon attorney made famous by Watergate. I’ve mentioned Dean before on this blog as an extremely incisive political observer. He said to Boxer that “this is probably the only time in history that a sitting president has admitted to an impeachable offense.”

   When Dean speaks I listen, but I didn’t need him to tell me this. Listening to Condi Rice, current Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor at the time, make lame excuses for those actions told me all I needed to know. She stumbled around, blindly flailing for a precedent or statute, finally settling on “I’m not a lawyer.”

   Pathetic. Deeply, deeply sad. Neither FISA nor the authorization given by congress to the president to make war on the Taliban using “all necessary force” even come close to mentioning giving the president the power to place wiretaps without ever getting a warrant. Nothing in the Patriot Act gives the president these powers. What the Patriot Act does give the president is the power to place a wiretap immediately, if necessary, and then take up to 72 hours to get a warrant from the super-top-secret court that oversees this activity. So all protestations that the president needed to act quickly are both disingenuous and besides the point.

   I’m extremely interested in seeing how the Preznit weasels out of this one. I feel like a front-row audience member to a Harry Houdini show. How can he possibly escape the box chained and dumped at the bottom of the lake? Will the amazing President Houdini make another miraculous escape?

   I am similarly interested in finding out how the right-wing propaganda machine excuses this, though of course they will try. If they succeed it will be like David Copperfield making the statue of liberty disappear.

   As of this date even Arlen Specter has said there will be an investigation, though I’ll believe it when I see it. I predict a long investigation stalled for years as every republican chair in congress finds a reason to gather more information, schedule something ahead of a hearing, etc.

   But you can only delay the inevitable so long. So when they actually decide the President did break the law, what then?

   My Chicago Tribune, who hasn’t endorsed a democrat for president in a century, does occasionally criticize the president for wrongdoing, including in this case. But they never suggest anything like an impeachment. Their solution is always to just sternly correct the president and go on with business as usual.

   Isn’t this congress, though, filled with congresspeople who impeached a president over lying about a blowjob? Didn’t this president, at the time a governor, say that the president should be removed from office because he “broke the law”?

   This president has broken the law. I’m waiting for an impeachment.