Bush’s Presidency Is at Stake in November – Vicious Campaign to Stave Off Impeachment Starts Today

Must-win: The start of 2006 signals the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a nasty election year. As of today, Team Bush is officially in war mode. Every move they make from now until November will be calibrated for maximum benefit to GOP candidates in the mid-term elections.

What is at stake is Mr. Bush’s viability as president. In public, Republicans may sneer at the idea that the president could be impeached, but if the Democrats regain control of either body, investigations into the administration’s actions on a whole host of matters would begin forthwith. Any one of those investigations could reveal crimes and/or cover-ups – and everybody knows it.

The list of Bush scandals that have been whitewashed by the corrupt Republicans who control the Congress is breathtaking. Here are the major ones:

• Voting irregularities in 2000 and 2004
• Cheney’s Enron-designed energy plan in 2001
• Response to 9/11
• War lies and/or gross official negligence in sending the nation to war on bad intel
• The CIA leak and cover-up
• The Downing Street memos
• The disastrous Katrina response
• Abramoff lobbying scandals
• Deliberately and repeatedly violating the FISA law

Pursuing just two or three of these items, the Dems could keep the Republicans on the defensive all the way up to the 2008 presidential election.

The GOP knows it faces a political disaster in the order of magnitude of Watergate. They are cornered and there is every reason to expect that this will be the most hard-fought mid-term election in memory.

Fortunately for them, however, they have one factor working in their favor: Their enemy is us.

Yesterday, on the Sunday news chat shows, Liberal Oasis spotted two leading Dems still playing softball – or was it footsie? – with Mr. Bush:

GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell on Fox News Sunday (as well as Dubya himself later in the afternoon to a pool of reporters) defended warrantless spying as necessary to national security, while attacking “the leak” that exposed the program as damaging to national security.

Here’s McConnell:

The Democrats, of course, were completely outraged in the Valerie Plame case that allegedly a classified matter was leaked … the national security was not endangered in that situation. But here, where clearly we’re talking about intercepts with people who are communicating internationally and potentially plotting another 9/11, they don’t have apparently the same kind of outrage.
This is a much more important investigation and should go forward. And I applaud the Justice Department for beginning it.

And here’s Bush:

…the fact that somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States. There’s an enemy out there. They read newspapers, they listen to what you write, they listen to what you put on the air, and they react…They attacked us before, they will attack us again if they can. And we’re going to do everything we can to stop them.

Translation: it’s the Democrats and the liberal media that are harming our national security, not our illegal warrantless spying.

In the face of such aggressive attacks, Dems should not flinch.

They should be arguing that the GOP approach of wanton power-grabbing and disregard for constitutional checks and balances leads to a mismanaged, unbalanced terror war, where the only plot that has been stopped was one that already had been called off because it was so poorly thought out.

Instead we get this from Sen. Chuck Schumer, on Fox News Sunday:

…I think everyone, Democrats and Republicans, wants to give the president the tools that he needs to fight the war on terror… .But the way our country works is the balance between security and liberty is a very delicate one. And obviously, in times of war, in times of terrorism, the balance shifts towards security, and it should. There are some on the doctrinaire left who say never change it. I don’t agree with that. Almost no Democrat does. But when you want to shift that balance, you have an open debate, you have some rules that are set, and then you have an independent arbiter look at those rules… And the problem here is that the president thought there was a problem. That’s legitimate. But instead of coming to people and saying okay, I need changes in the law, he just changed it on his own… You don’t just change it because the president wants to change it. You have a debate. You go to Congress. In most cases the president gets the changes he wants.

Translation: Hey George, if you wanted to spy on Americans without bothering with warrants, why didn’t you just ask us?!

Over at CNN, Sen. Dick Durbin was served up a softball question about Bush’s failure to capture Bin Laden, and he failed to swing:

WOLF BLITZER: Here’s what a lot of people, Senator, are saying. I get tons of e-mails. The United States, great superpower, greatest military, huge intelligence budget. Osama bin Laden still at large. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two, still at large. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, terrorist number one in Iraq, still at large. Why is it so hard, Senator Durbin…to find these guys?

DURBIN: Obviously, if they are still alive … they’re being secreted away some place with the help of others. But I’ve been through these briefings. I can recall a few months after our invasion in Iraq sitting down and getting a briefing and having someone, an intelligence agent point to a place on a map about the size of a quarter and say, this is where Osama bin Laden is and we’re going to get him.
They were so confident — this was three years ago — and it’s clear to me that they overstated the capacity of the agencies to find people like that … It obviously is an extremely difficult thing if this person is protected.

Translation: Don’t blame Bush, fighting terror is real hard!

How about mentioning that the Bush Administration took it’s eye off the ball by unnecessarily invading Iraq instead of staying focused on Al Qaeda?

How about arguing that warrantless fishing expeditions are not just illegal, they’re not effective at stopping terrorism?

What we on the left – “doctrinaire” or otherwise – should have learned well by now is that appeasement does not work. The only way to defeat idealogues like the Bushists is fight them agressively and in terms they understand.

If we whiff this one, democracy in America will be history.

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