The Impeachment Conspiracy

The New York Times has uncovered a vast Right-wing impeachment conspiracy!

Oh my God!

Is this part of Karl "the architect, Turd Blossom" Rove's grand design?

David D. Kirkpatrick writes:

Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.

The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives' plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.

For the last time, it's NOT domestic eavesdropping.

With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.

Why does Kirkpatrick assume that the Republican base is demoralized? I don't detect a mood of hopeless at all.

If Kirkpatrick is looking at the results of slanted polls conducted by lib media outlets and created to "reveal" Bush's dismal approval ratings to determine that the base is demoralized, perhaps he should look again.

A negative judgment of Bush's performance doesn't mean that conservatives feel defeated. It's a completely separate matter.

Furthermore, if conservative voters are dissatisfied, rather than staying away from the polls, I would think they'd be motivated to act.

"Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all."

This is so lame.

I disagree with Weyrich's assessment that the GOP's base is demoralized to the point of paralysis.

Conservatives have lots of reasons to go to the polls. This notion that they will stay home in droves is unfounded. Waging the war on terror, maintaining tax cuts, and keeping the economy rolling are just a few factors that could "inspire" conservatives to vote.


For weeks, Republicans have taken to conservative Web sites and talk radio shows to inveigh against the possibility, however remote, that Democrats could impeach Mr. Bush if they gained control of Congress. Mr. Feingold's censure proposal fell far short of a demand for impeachment. Most Democrats in the Senate distanced themselves from it, concerned that they would be tagged by Republicans as soft on terrorism. But the censure proposal provided Republicans an opening.

In this article, David D. Kirkpatrick suggests that the threat of Democrats seeking to impeach President Bush are far-fetched. He writes that Republican strategists are manipulating people, using impeachment to toy with the emotions of the base to energize it. That's false.

Three years ago, liberals were talking impeachment. They made it an issue.

On March 13, 2003, WorldNetDaily reported:

Formal efforts are now underway to impeach President Bush over allegations that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq constitutes "high crimes and misdemeanors," Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, reported today.

A meeting Tuesday assembled between 40-50 prominent liberal attorneys and legal scholars who mulled over articles of impeachment drafted against President Bush by activists. The two-hour session featured former attorney general-turned-activist Ramsey Clark and took place in the downtown office of a prominent Washington tort lawyer.

Participants said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who hosted the meeting, was the only member of Congress to attend.

"We had a pretty frank discussion about putting in a bill of impeachment against President Bush," said Francis Boyle, an Illinois law professor who has been working on the impeachment language with Clark.

The articles of impeachment were drafted by Boyle, who told WND that it is now a "matter of public record" that Rep. Conyers hosted, convened and asked for the meeting, which was held at a location close to the White House. Boyle also said that his campaign to impeach the president is independent from that of Ramsey Clark's.

The Left was lobbying for impeachment before the war in Iraq began! Since then, the calls for impeachment certainly haven't subsided.

In June of 2005, Dana Milbank wrote about the bizarre "let's pretend" event held by the Dems. It was a mock impeachment hearing over the Iraq war and televised on C-SPAN.

The gathering included Conyers, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Joe Wilson, and Cindy Sheehan, among others.

For Kirkpatrick to suggest that Republican operatives and conservative talk radio hosts are acting as fear mongers to scare conservatives into believing that impeachment is a possiblity is absolutely ridiculous.

Impeachment talk has been getting louder and louder. It's not just found on loony Leftist websites and Air America. It's coming from members of Congress, elected officials.

The threat of impeachment is not a tactic being exploited by the Right. The libs have shown repeatedly that they are considering it, through their words and actions.

The Internet is loaded with sites promoting impeachment.

The Hollywood loons, including Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss, and Rob Reiner, are echoing the cries.

Members of the press, like Eleanor Clift, have also been arguing that impeachment could happen. Clift said:

"The Libby indictments have opened the door to making the wider case against the Bush administration that they misled the country into war....The next logical step is impeachment, and I think you’re going to hear that word come up and if the Democrats ever capture either house of Congress there are going to be serious proceedings against this administration."

Obviously, impeachment talk is not just being employed by scheming Republicans. It's been a mainstay of the Left since Bush's first term.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Feingold declined to rule out supporting impeachment in the future, saying that the wiretapping "probably is the kind of thing the founding fathers thought of as high crimes and misdemeanors."

But Mr. Feingold also said he proposed the milder rebuke of censure instead of impeachment in part because of the context of the war and in part to avoid a political backlash from Mr. Bush's supporters.

"They can try to turn this into their fantasy, but that is not how this comes off," Mr. Feingold said, noting that his proposal addressed only the narrow subject of the wiretapping program. "I didn't throw in Iraq or a lot of other things that frankly are pretty bad."

On Monday, when Feingold introduced his censure resolution, he said, "As we move forward, Congress will need to consider a range of possible actions, including investigations, independent commissions, legislation, or even impeachment. But, at a minimum, Congress should censure a president who has so plainly broken the law."

Several senators besides Feingold have talked about impeachment as an option in their arsenal of possible attacks.

Yes, it's extremely unlikely that clueless Dems could actually get an impeachment effort off the ground. Frankly, I think they just enjoy making empty threats, sort of like the Dems' foreign policy strategy.

However, it's still wrong for Kirkpatrick to assert that Republicans have dreamed up the impeachment possibility in order to get out the vote.

The premise for his article is flat-out false.

The Dems have been engaging in impeachment talk for years. They made it a reality.

I do think it's wise for the Republicans to make the most of the Dems' lunacy. It makes sense to me to hold the Dem nutjobs accountable for discussing the impeachment of our president while the nation is at war. It is completely appropriate for Republicans to make the public aware of how crazed the irrational fringe of the Democratic Party is.

There's no conspiracy here; just the cold, hard fact that the Dems are playing political games and obstructing rather than working with President Bush to make America secure and prosperous.