Like the pennant hopes of many a baseball team, the hopes of so many for a big juicy impeachment trial are fading for good here in the Congressional dog days of summer. The Senate put the first stake through impeachment's coffin last night, with more doubtless to follow.

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Impeachment dreams were never very realistic. Not this close to an election, when they would have introduced a most unwelcome reminder of the worst parts of the late 90s into Hillary Clinton's campaign. She had no interest in 24-hour talk-TV yammering about blow jobs, the meaning of is, executive privilege, Democratic payback-- and how we wasted the late 90s obsessing about such trivialities and playing tit-for-tat (so to speak) while our enemies planned 9/11.

Nor was there much more stomach for it among Congressional leaders, who never care for processes with unforeseeable endings. The big problem with the impeachment of Bush (or Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez; your real impeachment hounds plan to take out as many of their enemies in one go as Michael Corleone at a baptism) was that the desire for impeachment long preceded any specific charge.

Indeed, everyone who dreams of it seems to have a different high crime they're high on promoting. The first one says it's the way he "lied" us into war (let's dig up FDR and impeach him for aiding the British during a time of legal neutrality while we're at it, then). The next says it's for "spying on Americans" (even though it's by no means clear that that's at all a fair description of the program). The next would do it for his pardoning Scooter Libby and thus silencing him right before Fitzmas! (Sorry, the president's pardon power is very nearly Constitutionally absolute.) Still others for Katrina (because, of course, mismanagement in Louisiana, a Democratic stronghold for the last century, is the sole responsibility of a Republican president). And some even would remove him for "wrecking the economy" (which is at an historic stock market high and a near-historic unemployment low).

It's even more of a parody than the Clinton impeachment was-- "We know what the sentence should be, now we just have to choose a crime!" The Congressional leadership has no interest in letting the dogs loose to chase so many wild geese, just to satisfy the bloodlust at Daily Kos and The Nation and Camp Casey (and thus sew up the furthest left 10% of the electorate for the Dems, while alienating much of the swing voting middle).

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But just in case, like some commenters here, you believed that the case was still building at the grass roots level, that eventually Congress would have to listen to the people, man, not yet, but soon, you have to look at last night's vote as the Senate seriously knocking the legs out from under the whole effort.

Recognizing that the 30-year-old FISA regs were not suited to the present day, that they were preventing us from listening to wholly foreign traffic which happened to pass through US networks (as much of the world's telephone traffic does), as well as preventing us from listening to bad guys actually on our soil as they talked to known comrades overseas (and FISA courts had often been quite restrictive in how they granted subpoenas for such traffic), the Senate ignored several more limited proposals from the likes of Jay Rockefeller and passed one that basically gave the president everything his point man, Mike McConnell, asked for.

How does that effect impeachment? Well, technically, of course, they could still impeach the president for breaking a law back then, even though it's no longer illegal now. But obviously the political will for that would be nonexistent. And so the whole "domestic spying" issue falls from the ranks of possible impeachment charges. That leaves others, of course, but having watched Congress fold like a cheap suit on one, who really believes they'll suddenly show extra starch on any others?

Impeachment, if it was ever real (and I don't believe it was), is dead, like pennant hopes, like lost youth, like the leaves on the trees will soon be.

But there's always next season...