Who would be president if Bush were impeached is beside the point.  As far as I can tell, impeachment is the only possible way to stop this stuff dead in its tracks, which is far more important than the Bush presidency or anybody else's presidency.

Is there any other recourse?  It's all hypothetical because there isn't the faintest chance Bush will be impeached, or that it would even reach the stage of formal consideration by the House unless the Democrats get it back in 2006, which seems not in the realm of possibility.

But is impeachment the only control on a defiant law-breaker and Constitution-buster in the White House?

I think it is, and once that horse is out of the barn, that a determined president can defy the law, the Courts, the Congress and the Constitution with no consequence, there's no way of stopping him or his successors. 

Posted at December 20, 2005 7:00 AM in response to NSA Wiretaps

I think your reader's suggestion that this is all about retrospective universal email mining is dead on.  It fits every aspect of this otherwise extremely peculiar situation.  It also fits with George Bush's vainglorious self-image as bold and daring and willing to be (politically) martyred in defense of the American people.

Like many, I wonder what's the point of being "safe" if this is what we turn into.  Assuming this kind of tactic actually accomplishes anything (which I have doubts about, given this administration's past history), we're saving lives at the expense of everything this country is supposed to stand for and what the Founding Fathers labored to hard to forestall.

God help us.  The Bush/Cheney axis is bad enough, but imagine if these tools and the precedent to use them without consequence falls into the hands of some future Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum.  I can only hope I'm too senile to be aware of what's going on when that happens.

Jay Rockefeller's a good-hearted old dude.  What he should have done, instead of sending a pathetic handwritten note, was make one hell of a public stink about this, take the consequences, and go down in American history as a hero.

I'm literally sick to my stomach. 

Posted at December 19, 2005 5:28 PM in response to NSA Wiretaps

Clinton is a "lying scumbag"?  The Clintons are "liars and scoundrels?"

Apparently, more than just Republican die-hards bought into the right-wing drumbeat, which only underlines the point about needing to stand up on talk shows, etc., and blast Bush's incompetence.

I don't want to revisit the Clinton wars here, just register surprise and vehement disagreement with those comments.

Posted at September 6, 2005 8:45 AM in response to The Will 2 Believe

Justy FYI, one of CNN's meteorologists just reported that the NOAA issued an alert at 5:00 PM on FRIDAY -- not a typo, Friday -- that Katrina was turning into a 4-5 category storm and that NOLA was in the area it was likely to hit.

Posted at September 3, 2005 11:47 AM in response to Rhetoric and Rebuilding (redux)

Ari, relax.  No kidding, you're fighting a straw man largely of your own construction here.  Nobody is seriously considering abandoning NOLA-- not Denny Hastert and not environmentalists, who have no clout anyway these days.

Your politcal antennae need some adjusting, too.  "Upbeat" politicians are -- rightly, in my opinion -- being excoriated by both press and public right now.  If the relief and rescue effort had been even moderately competent and it was clear the human problem was being taken care of promptly, then you would be right that the politicians would need to mix in a good deal of upbeat happy talk about rebuilding NOLA along with their sympathy for the victims and refugees.

But that's, obviously, not the case.  Because of the disaster of the disaster relief, the politicians, the media and the public are going to be preoccupied for quite some time with worrying about the fate of the victims, deconstructing what happened and figuring out whose fault it was and laying loud blame.  That's entirely as it should be.

When the refugees have been taken care of, what remains of the city is under control and the levees patched and the water starting to recede-- only then can people start to clear the mental and emotional decks and make room for thinking about rebuilding and projecting optimism and all that good stuff.

It will happen that way.  Guaranteed.  It's the natural cycle of human emotion and attention spans.  As you point out so clearly, there is WAY too much invested in NOLA and it's way too critical to the US economy for there to be any other response.

But I agree 100 percent with the commenter who observed that what's likely to rise in the old NOLA's place will certainly be very different than the old one, and we all may or may not end up being happy about that. 

PS-- as an emotionally city-averse environmentalist, I can assure you that the grumbling about the impossible situation of NOLA is just that, grumbling.  It's clear there are many, many places on this fabulous continent that should not be permanently inhabited by human beings and the infrastructure of what we humorously refer to as civilization-- NOLA is one of them, so is most of the coastline east, west and south, so is much of California, the big river flood plains, etc.

Nevertheless, we do live in those places, and not even the most deranged environmental fanatic thinks that's going to change any time this geologic era.  It's just grumbling.  It's just muttering about the eternal folly of human beings and the rape of nature.

Posted at September 3, 2005 7:48 AM in response to Rhetoric and Rebuilding (redux)

 Maureen Hay observed:

"The relentless news focus on the looting can't have helped.  The most compassionate news broadcast I heard was NBC Nightly News last night, where the viewers were reminded that they were going to be viewing people who were behaving as most people would when they feared for the lives and safety of their families and loved ones.  In contrast, most broadcasts on Wednesday were talking about the crimes being committed."

Maureen, you will I think be pleased to know that it didn't take long for the entire tenor of this to change, at least on the cable nets.  Even Fox News people were routinely pointing out that much of the looting was being done by desperate people trying to save their own and their families'  lives.

Astoundingly, even the queen harpy of CNN, Nancy Grace, was openly repenting Thursday night of her fury about looting and expressing genuine sympathy (sympathy!  Nancy Grace!).

I think what's happened is that the reporters on the ground have been vividly describing the desperation of these trapped souls and even the anchors and commentators have learned something.

Of course, that hasn't stopped whoever at these nets chooses the film clips from running the same days-old video of the same dozen people running out of stores on a seemingly endless loop every time anybody says anything about crime or violence, but...

Amusingly, Wolf Blitzer as I write is doing his second segment in two days about some poor, poor souls trapped in the Ritz Carlton.  These unhappy people were forced -- forced, I tell you! -- to walk FOUR WHOLE BLOCKS to the Marriott to be rescued-- with an armed escort.

I tell you, the suffering of these unhappy rich white people knows no bounds.

Posted at September 2, 2005 2:57 PM in response to New Orleans: Not Going Anywhere

Blanco to some extent, but particularly Nagin, whatever their negligence in failing to provide some way out of the city pre-hurricane for all those folks with no money and no cars, are screaming to get the attention of the federal government.

IMHO, there's plenty of time once this horrible, horrible human disaster has been mitigated and things are back under some kind of control, to blather on <sorry> optimistically about rebuilding the city.

Right now, they need to get their people taken care of, and the nicer they are about it, seems to me, the less likely they are to get a response from this unbelievably oblivious administration.

Frankly, I'd like to see them -- and Mary Landrieu and everybody else -- do a lot more screaming and a lot less happy talk than they're doing about the totally, utterly criminally incompetent federal response to this terrible situation.

Posted at September 2, 2005 8:08 AM in response to New Orleans: Not Going Anywhere

cscs asks, " Who are they turning away from New Orleans?"

They're turning away almost *everybody* from NOLA, from Salvation Army people to Canadian rescue helicopters being refused permission to cross the border.

More importantly, you cannot get into the city because of the flooding and the random violence.  The problem isn't a lack of volunteer foot or car-propelled manpower, or even money, the problem is primarily lack of equipment  and supplies in the area.

Streams of well-meaning volunteers trying to get into the city right now would only make the problems there dramatically worse, not better.  This is way too big to be dealt with spontaneously.  It needs strong coordination from somewhere and a determination to get things done, and the only place that can come from is the feds-- and it ain't happening.

So-called director of so-calld homeland security Chertoff *did not know* until late yesterday that there were thousands of people holed up at the convention center for days without food or water or any kind of help, people literally dying while they waited in vain for buses that never came.

How is it possible for people like him to be so oblivious to things that all the news channels, very much including their house organ, Fox News, have been reporting on for days I have no idea.  It's incomprehensible to me.

Posted at September 2, 2005 8:00 AM in response to New Orleans: Not Going Anywhere

"my finger began pointing first at the Mayor for being no Giuliani, then at the Governor for being less than ringing in her denunciation of looting,"

Whaa?   What in God's name does a "ringing denunciation" of looting do for anybody?

As others have pointed out already, the looting is being done by people who are TRAPPED in the city with no power, food, water, and no sign of emergency rescues and no hope of getting out any time soon.  As numerous on-air reporters are saying, the people they're seeing on the streets are desperate and have moved into survival mode-- anything it takes to stay alive and keep their families alive.

Could we PLEASE stop yapping about "looting"?  NO is completely out of control, people are literally dying while waiting for help on the highway and at the convention center, and Mayor Nagin is directing police to stop rescuing people and concentrate on "looters'?  Sorry, but that sounds like prime Giuliani-ism to me.  And I don't mean that as a compliment.

Where was Mayor Nagin when he ordered the city evacuated without, apparently, one second's thought given to how the poor and carless were going to be able to get out? Apparently, he's the mayor only of the middle class in NO, and all he's got for the poor is police protection for the only sources of food, water and diapers in the city.

Feh.

And shame on you. 

Posted at September 1, 2005 12:37 PM in response to The Biggest Breach of All

But Novak doesn't have to choose between lying and getting himself in trouble legally.  All he has to do is what he's been doing, just say he's not going to discuss the subject at all on the advice of his lawyers.

Granted, it's stressful for him to have to sit there and refuse to answer questions from Ed Henry or somebody, so he'd far rather not be put in that position.  But I think that's all CNN has been doing with him is acknowledging that he really does have to follow his lawyers' advice on this and that there's not much point in badgering one of their own employees on air about something he's not going to talk about.

What I'd be curious to know is why Ed Henry was apparently about to do just that anyway.  I can't imagine that Plame investigation questions directed to Novak on air don't have to be approved in advance by CNN brass, so I wonder what's up with that. 

Posted at August 7, 2005 8:04 AM in response to My Theory: Act III Continues to Unfold