The Retroactive Purge

There were a lot of detours and hair-pins on the long, troll-infested road to the GOP becoming the openly unhinged cult of lunatics, imbeciles, demagogues and bigots that they are today.  But one of the last barriers to their full-throated, baying at the moon insanity was lifted by Nancy Pelosi back in 2006:

Pelosi: Bush Impeachment `Off the Table’

By Susan Ferrechio

Published: November 8, 2006

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi promised Wednesday that when her party takes over, the new majority will not attempt to remove President Bush from office, despite earlier pledges to the contrary from others in the caucus.

“I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said during a news conference.

Pelosi also said Democrats, despite complaining about years of unfair treatment by the majority GOP, “are not about getting even” with Republicans.

She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.

“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”

She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.

Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.

“We know, ‘stay the course,’ is not the way,” Pelosi said.

...

Anyone who made it through the Clinton years has no excuse for not knowing to a moral certainty that the GOP had finally abandoned any pretense of caring about governance, and had let the raving, bigoted Limbaugh/Gingrich/Falwell Id of the Party of Lincoln completely off the leash once and for all.

And yet, when the moment arrived when history demanded a level of seriousness and accountability concomitant with the actual high crimes the Bush Administration has committed,  then-Speaker Pelosi failed her office, her constituent and her country.

And the GOP had made it so fucking easy!  By spending six years on well-publicized witch-hunts that came to nothing and then rolling out the entire impeachment apparatus in order to depose Clinton over trivia, they had already gone on the record as being enthusiastically in favor of launching full-bore congressional hearings replete with Special Prosecutors over little more than rumors planted by crackpot right-wing billionaires in the wingnut press:

From Brother Charles Pierce:

Not to disagree with Jay Bookman too strenuously, but the Republicans "legitimized impeachment" as a tool of partisan politics in 1998. People talked about impeaching Bill Clinton for years; aides to Tom Delay were openly telling reporters in Washington, after the Republican sweep in the 1994 midterms, that they could impeach Clinton any time they wanted. Ann Coulter wrote a book arguing that impeachment was essentially a political act that a congressional majority could undertake just because they had the votes to do so. Bob Barr wrote a book advocating Clinton's impeachment long before anyone ever had heard of Monica Lewinsky. The fact is that impeachment -- or to be more precise, the threat of impeachment -- was a political tactic already at hand to the Republicans any time they wanted to use it. Criminalizing the simple election of a Democratic president was a club that already was in the bag.

All Nancy Pelosi had to do was copy the Republican script, white-out the word "blowjob", write in "war crimes" and 80% of the paperwork would be done.  But she decided not to do that, and the day she chose to sacrifice her Constitutional responsibility to the God of Bipartisanship, was the day the immortality of the Neocons was assured:

Dick Cheney’s Awfulness Is Here to Stay

Why does the former veep keep saying unhinged things—as he did Monday about Iraq? Because he believes them. And Rand Paul notwithstanding, most GOP insiders believe them, too.

People seem mystified by Dick Cheney. What on earth is he doing, popping up with such regularity defending a wholly discredited position, as he did again Monday at a Politico forum? Why would he continue to say things like invading Iraq was “absolutely the right thing to do”? The track record of utterances he compiled as vice president—all of them collected on video for our present-day delectation, like his famous “weeks rather than months” prediction to CBS’ Bob Schieffer right before we started the Iraq war—would have a person of decency and modesty hiding in self-imposed exile in the Pampean Andes.

I contend that there’s nothing mysterious about him at all. Incredible as it may seem, he does still think he was right. The tactical mistakes, if there were any, were mere details. But the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, he still undoubtedly believes. And it’s important that we understand the real reason he thinks it was the right thing to do, because Iraq failure or no Iraq failure, Rand Paul or no Rand Paul, Cheney’s view will always be dominant in the Republican Party’s higher echelons.

...

The day she told Republicans that no one would ever hold them accountable for their Big, Bloody Lies was the day the leadership of the Democratic Party made "The Tea Party" -- that hilarious Republican re-branding scheme based on Gish Galloping the media with one crazy lie after another -- inevitable.

There was a moment when we had a chance to bring actual elected traitors and war criminals to book for their crimes.  There was a moment when we had a chance to force the media to do its fucking job by turning the Iraq clusterfuck into a year-long public civics lesson which they would have had no choice but report. 

But the leaders of the Democratic Party did not do any of that.  Instead they declared a Retroactive Purge and announced to the world that for the duration of the Bush Regime, all Republican crime was legal.  The leaders of the Democratic Party chose to let inmates of America's political Arkham Asylum -- the criminals and lunatics and evil men of the Republican Party -- get away with exploiting a stolen election and the worst terrorist attack in American history to ram through budget decimating tax-cuts, establish a torture regime run out of the White House and lie us into the wrong war.

The world we now live in is the one which those madmen have made:

And in that world, nothing exists before January, 2009:

Boehner’s ‘political stunt’ will lead to Obama’s impeachment

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Let’s say by some miracle the case actually gets a hearing. When Obama’s detractors realize, as RedState’s Erickson pointed out, that their target of ire “will be out of office before such a suit is finally resolved,” they will demand he be punished “Now!” Impeachment will be their ticket because it is easier to accomplish than winning a lawsuit. All that’s needed is a simple majority of the House of Representatives to impeach a president and put an asterisk next to his name in the history books.

The one thing some Republicans have cited as their excuse for not doing so sooner is that the Democrats control the Senate. See, impeachment is a two-step process. The House impeaches, but the Senate convicts with a two-thirds majority or 67 votes. President Andrew Johnson (1868) and President Bill Clinton (1998) were impeached. Neither was convicted. Folks forget that part, if they knew it at all.

Last summer, Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) told a constituent demanding Obama’s impeachment that “you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it” before adding, “But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted …” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) made a similar assertion then, too. And just today, according to a tweet from Chad Pergram, who covers Congress for Fox News, “Rep Joe Barton (R-TX) on Obama: I think he’s impeachable..But its not practical…it won’t get two thirds in the Senate.”

If Democratic control of the Senate is the only thing holding them back, imagine the pressure on Boehner to impeach Obama if the GOP retakes the Senate in the November midterm elections. Because the speaker repeatedly has shown an inability to bring the tea party faction of his caucus to heel, I fully expect Boehner to buckle.