Don't Gloat Yet

This has not been a good year for George W. Bush. His stalled legislative agenda sits covered in pocket lint. A federal judge just tossed his beloved "intelligent design" out of classrooms. Bush's associates and allies are being indicted, and there's promise of more to come. (Anyone notice that Bob Novak now claims that Bush knew who leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press?) Lies, deceptions and abrogations of justice keep coming to light. That war of his isn't looking so good. One of America's greatest cities was lost on his watch.

Members of his own party scorned him when he nominated his prized Kewpie doll to the Supreme Court, expressed dismay over his administration of the USA Patriot Act, and shamed him over his embrace of torture. Members of his own species the world over are aghast at the thuggish, selfish vision of America he's created.

And, in the halls of Congress, there's a word being whispered a little louder each day: impeachment . . . impeachment. . . IMPEACHMENT . . . IMPEACHMENT!

That's right: Impeachment, it's not just for blowjobs anymore.

As recently noted by John Dean—who saw Richard Nixon's abuses of power in full flower—when George W. Bush said on camera that he had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans, he was admitting to an impeachable offense. He broke a 1978 law, a felony, put in place to prevent Nixon's abuses from recurring. Members of Bush's own party are a little steamed about that, too.

I don't know about you, but I don't feel like rejoicing.

That's not just because Bush won't be impeached, not by this Congress. He could carve a swastika in his forehead and be videotaped peeing on Dwight Eisenhower's exhumed corpse, and most Republicans would still argue that it's a post-9/11 world, where a President's gotta take extreme measures.

I'm not rejoicing because, for every cock-up Bush gets called to task for, there are a dozen others for which he doesn't, and all of them diminish our nation.

How can one exult over how wrong he and his advisers are about Iraq when scores of thousands of people are dead as a result and more are still dying, while the towns we haven't bombed into hummus yet are overrun with murderous cops, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish death squads, terrorists, god-addled jihadists and corporate hired goons from the unfettered killing fields of South Africa and Central America? As Donald Rumsfeld compactly put it, "Freedom is messy."

Which was sure the case in the Gulf states, where a criminal lack of planning and even more criminal lack of follow-through contributed to Hurricane Katrina leaving over 1,300 people dead and a region devastated. To this day there are some 6,000 persons still unaccounted for. In America! How is that possible?

You can bet they'd be accounted for if they were war protestors, because the Pentagon, National Guard, FBI and police agencies have been intensively spying on anti-war groups. If you're an outspoken one of the 150 million Americans who oppose the war, do you know what you're called in the Pentagon's surveillance logs (the news of which just surfaced this December)? You're a "threat."

They can't find Osama bin Laden, so they'll find you protesting at Bristol and Anton. Don't you feel safer already? The FBI spies on Greenpeace and PETA, and cites eco-terrorism as our biggest domestic threat. This, while the rest of the world rightly views U.S. policy as the biggest threat to the planet's survival. Bush's stand on global warming—ignoring the rest of the world and the overwhelming consensus of scientists—is one more thing making us a pariah nation. Our government's more concerned about some dealer's SUVs going up in flames than it is about the whole world doing so.

May I take a breather here? While I do, I'd like to address those of you who are considering writing in to accuse me of being a Bush-hater. Let me save you the trouble: I hate Bush. I hope it's not a federal crime to say so, but I'd throw dog shit at him if I could.

Maybe he's a loving husband and enjoys a good joke, but he's a lying, sneaking bully. Have you seen the photo of the college-age Bush on the rugby field, sucker-punching an unsuspecting player? That's who he is, and it doesn't help now that he's got his own personal Jesus whispering to him, never wondering why that tongue in his ear is forked: "Go on, bomb those neighborhoods, George. It's what I'd do." "More tax cuts for the rich would be heavenly, don't you think?" "Wanna see me make Terri Schiavo wink?"