Battlepanda: To impeach or to censure?

Battlepanda

Always trying to figure things out with the minimum of bullshit and the maximum of belligerence.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

To impeach or to censure?

Oh, there is ground for impeachment alright. Boy, is there ever grounds for impeachment. I read Nick Beaudrot with disbelief when he said that "I think that the Clinton impeachment has raised the bar for what ought to be an impeachable offense. Politically, if the opposition party calls for every President's head, we will have turned what ought to have been a very solemn process into nothing more than a political tool." Whuuuut? It's not like we're trying to railroad Bush here. He did the crime. Now the only question is, whether it is possible to make him pay for it.

However, Nick did raise the very good point that further tarnishing the reputation of Team Bush is going to go into diminishing returns rather quickly -- this is already a lame-duck administration caught in one breakout of scandal after another. If we do go for impeachment based on one wrongdoing among many, we are taking away attention from a whole panoply of Republican malefeasance occuring at every level in favor of focusing the spotlight at the top. Even if the impeachment process itself (Nick is also right in pointing out that we do not have enough votes in the senate for the impeachment to be actually successful) drags Bush's name in the mud as deep as it will go, it will not be a good move if we are allowing other Republicans to escape censure -- they are the one's we will be running against in '06 and '08.