Government At 11, Impeachment At 12

By Cernig

Jill over at Brilliant At Breakfast has her righteous rant on in fine style today, as she wonders what it would take to have Pelosi et al put impeachment back on the table.

The laws upon which this country was founded presupposed at least a modicum of good will on the part of those who would lead it. Checks and balances were built in to prevent any one individual or any one branch of government from gaining too much power. These were designed to protect us from the kinds of despotic individuals that would set themselves up as kings or dictators.

The words "no one could have anticipated..." have become hallmarks of the Bush Administration, but in the case of the way this bunch has circumvented every attempt by the Founding Fathers to make our system immune from people like them, it's clear that the men who rebelled against a king and created a new government, like the humanists they read, believed in the inherent good will of those that would seek to lead this nation. They never banked on bandits taking over and deciding that the laws codified in the Constitution didn't apply to them.

And so we find ourselves now with an administration and a party that puts its own gain and its own power not just ahead of the good of the nation, but supplanting the good of the nation, so that this country is now nothing but a fiefdom for the corporatocracy, to be plundered by those who seek ever more power and ever more money -- even if it means taking the entire country down.

In other words, do George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, and especially Dick Cheney, recognize that there is a kind of criminal tipping point beyond which Americans are unable to believing their government capable? And is that why as the exact nature of this bunch becomes ever more apparent, ever more brazen, and ever more appalling, the sound you hear is only that of crickets chirping?

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman goes through the motions of hearings, while the party he represents has shown itself to be lacking the courage to protect this nation from the criminals now sitting in the executive branch and their lackeys in the Senate and House. Instead, they, just like the president and his war in Iraq, choose to run out the clock rather than honor the many hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have died over the last 231 years defending this country by providing the oversight and accountability for which they were elected.

And over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau explains that it is no accident things have happened this way.

in some sense every gang of politicians will try to do as much as they think they can get away with. But everybody has their limits, defined largely by how far they think they can go before somebody stops them, and how much they’re willing to risk (be it jail time, political capital, personal re-election prospects, long-term prospects for the party, reputation, employment prospects after their term ends, etc.). This bunch basically said “We’ll go all the way to impeachment. This is what it takes. If there is no impeachment, the President can do anything he wants.”

If you refuse to be daunted by anything less than impeachment, then you’ll have no problem turning the government all the way to 11. Which is exactly what we’ve gotten.

With government at 11 but no sign of impeachment before at least 12, that's the way things will stay.