The Impeachment Campaign, Part 3: Practical Impeachment Politics (Step Two: Implied Impeachment):
This week, in a series that's lasted two or three days longer than originally intended, the Rude Pundit has been exploring how to approach the notion of impeaching George W. Bush as a legitimate issue in this year's midterm Congressional elections (popularly known as "Wait, Didn't We Just Elect Joe/Joanie Blow To the House of Representatives?"). In Part 1, the whole problem was put forth as an analogy of an individual woman fucking an individual guy from Italy. In Part 2, the Rude Pundit proposed, impractically, but dreamily, that Democrats make the national Congressional campaign about impeaching Bush - you wanna get rid of Bush? Vote Democratic. Yesterday, the Rude Pundit offered direct rhetorical advice on how to drag individual Republicans down by tying them to Bush. No, it wasn't Lakoff-ian or even Luntz-esque, but, you know, it sure would kick some ass.

Let's bring this home: any reasonably well-informed beagle knows that if Democrats win the House and Senate, there's a better than 50-50 chance for Bush's impeachment and removal from office. The kicker, the thing that's got Karl Rove shitting blood as much as his impending indictment, is that the public wants Bush gone, his Administration buried, and a chance to take a group piss on the mass grave that'll be left behind. And Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for the public's willingness to accept the rarity and severity of impeachment.

'Cause, and let's get this straight, Republicans made sure that we moved into a fucked-up Never-Neverland of political gamesmanship, creating brave new worlds of bullshit power plays guaranteed to appeal to the basest of the base and alienate the majority of the nation in disgust. In recent history, the major invocations of impeachment prior to Bill Clinton were based on very real, nation-damaging crimes: Nixon's cover-up and abuses of power (by the way, read the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon - pussy stuff compared to what could be brought against Bush) and Ronald Reagan for the Iran-Contra debacle (of course, Reagan had descended into Alzheimer's dementia and was, for all intents and purposes, a pull-string talking Cabbage Patch Kid by the time impeachment was discussed).

In 1998, Republicans rammed through Articles of Impeachment against Bill Clinton, which, no matter what way you read it, say, "He lied about the fucking and tried to get others to lie about the fucking," thus dragging the nation into the right wing's bizarro fixation on the ways in which cocks and cunts are used. What they did also was to throw the whole national equilibrium off, turning the federal government into a chaotic zone where anything and everything is possible.

If you've ever been on a really long, good acid trip, you know of what the Rude Pundit speaks: sure, sure, when you first disappear into your own head, your own repressed shit and memories of shit, when it first comes at you as images and shifting colors and perceptions, you're fucked up by it: why the fuck are flowers coming out of the stereo speakers? Why is Jesus jacking off on a nun? Why's the nun a sheep? And if she's a sheep, how do you know she's a nun? But soon, you realize that the logic of the whole thing is non-logic, that you simply are existing in chaos, trippin' balls, and you accept that your girlfriend's vagina will talk to you and that the TV is your dearest friend and your worst enemy.

So the United States is dragged through the Clinton impeachment, eye-rolling the whole time, like children embarassed by how square their parents are. But Republicans aren't done, by any stretch, in fucking with the fabric of reality. We get to 2000 and all of a sudden we have frat boy riots trying to stop ballot counting, the sight of Republicans acting like they're a bunch of male chimps with hard-ons trying to fuck the last female chimp in heat, as if the country could crumble into a pile of shit and rubble if we waited a month or two to see who was really President. And, again, the public is watching all of this, aghast, wondering when it all became like tequila night at the Southern Ladies Book Club meeting. Republicans created a nation where anything can happen and let disorder rule the land. For the most part, they've made that insanity work to their benefit. Until now.

In other words, to bottom line this fucker, anyone who thinks that the general public gives two shits if the nation is "dragged" into impeachment hearings and trials has had some big-time blinders on. Chaos is the law of the land, motherfuckers. Democrats ought to embrace its possibilities and effects, and promise to throw the nation into political turmoil.

Why wait for the next presidential election? Against a grave and growing threat, shouldn't we be taking pre-emptive action?

Note: Impeach Bush Coalition and Dan Savage's Impeach the Motherfucker Already are fine sites for all things impeachy.