Is Bush’s Intransigence Clearing the Way for Impeachment?

Rascally Rob Salkowitz over at Emphasis Added dares to think the unthinkable in the wake of Bush's apparent rejection of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations:

The fact is, Bush is extremely unpopular in the country, has no friends among the Democratic majority in Congress (with the exception, as always, of Lieberman), has shown himself to be ballot-box poison for Republicans outside the Deep South, and is visibly losing his handpicked war. He and Vice President Cheney, along with various members of the Administration, have left six years of ticking Constitutional timebombs that could constitute a lengthy bill of particulars if explored fully by an Investigatory Committee, or could very easily precipitate a Constitutional crisis (by, say, failing to comply with a subpoena) wherein Congress would have Impeachment as a recourse.

Against that eventuality, Bush could, up until last week, count on the institutional support of the power Establishment. Whatever their problems with him, their fear of populist uprising was always great enough to rise to the defense of the institution of the Presidency.

Now that it’s clear Bush has no use for an Establishment that was clearly sticking its own neck out to give him cover, it’s no longer certain that moves toward removing Bush and Cheney from office would be met with such unanimous and authoritative opposition. In fact, I’m sure there are many conservative, partisan Republicans making cold-blooded calculations about the value of propping the obviously-unfit Bush up for another two years – to say nothing of those who are actually concerned that our national interests will be irreparably harmed if Bush isn’t stripped of his destructive and obstructive powers.

Click here for the rest.

So I've been calling for impeachment for years now, but then, that's pretty easy for me to do because, you know, I'm a crazy leftie who doesn't really mind if society is upended as long as we get some justice out of it all in the end. Rob, however, while definitely a liberal, is much closer to the political center than I am, and most likely more intelligent, to boot: when you have somebody with his smarts politically positioned the way he is calling for impeachment, it, for me, constitutes the beginnings of the proverbial writing on the wall.

As I said, Rob's no flaming leftist - for instance, he's blasted Noam Chomsky on his blog on at least one occasion - but his analyisis reminds me greatly of something the bespectacled and politically explosive linguistics professor once said about Nixon's near-impeachment. Chomsky's view, in contrast to the standard narrative about Watergate and all that, is that Nixon so offended the ruling elite, or "power Establishment" as Rob puts it today, by slowly but surely whittling away at their piece of the power pie that they essentially allowed the impeachment movement to proceed--this assumes, of course, that such forces had the ability to shut it down whenever they desired, but I don't really think that's too much of a stretch to believe.

(Here is an essay written in 1973, before Nixon's resignation, where Chomsky lays out the power dynamic, but prematurely concludes that the establishment so needed a powerful presidency that they would never allow an impeachment to happen. Chomsky later admitted that he underestimated how strongly Nixon had pissed these people off.)

If Rob's right, that may very well be what's happening right now. Bush's utter rejection of the ISG report has conceivably so offended the "power Establishment" that it is within the realm of reason to imagine that they will soon get out of the way, and allow the current impeachment movement to go ahead unimpeded.

History repeats. I hope.

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