Bush and gridlock and impeachment … oh my

September 9, 2006

A new CNN [tag]poll[/tag] is worth paying close attention to. At first blush, the results appear to be discouraging, but they’re far from it.

Americans foresee “more gridlock” in government if Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate after elections this fall, a CNN poll shows.

And while the poll shows a majority of Americans would favor probes by a Democratic Congress into Bush administration actions, most Americans oppose impeaching President Bush.

Let’s take those one at a time. On the first question, 70% expect “gridlock and stalemate” while 27% believe there would be “cooperation between the two parties.” This is kind of silly for two reasons. First, as Josh Marshall noted, the wording of CNN’s poll question “is a textbook example of the question itself dictating the answer.”

Second, [tag]CNN[/tag] failed to ask whether people might prefer “gridlock” to a GOP agenda pushed through a Republican Congress with a Republican White House. Earlier this year, an NBC/WSJ poll found that a clear majority wanted Dems to prevent the GOP from “going too far,” even if that means more “partisan gridlock.”

Nevertheless, CNN’s questions about Democratic investigations and possible impeachment just as enlightening.

In all, 55% said they think it would be good for the country “if the Democrats in Congress were able to conduct official investigations into what the Bush administration has done in the past six years.” In contrast, 41% said such probes would be bad for the country.

That’s pretty good, when you think about it. Republicans have been warning voters the last few months that Congress will become some kind of radical investigating machine, bent on accountability, so we better leave the GOP in the majority. This poll suggests Americans actually want official investigations into Bush’s conduct.

For that matter, 30% said [tag]Bush[/tag] should face [tag]impeachment[/tag]. In other words, a higher percentage of the country supports Bush impeachment now than supported Clinton impeachment at the height of the Lewinsky scandal. (You know, before he was actually impeached.)

Granted, 30% support is hardly overwhelming, but for an idea that Republican dismiss as sheer madness, it’s a pretty strong number, don’t you think?

27% believe there would be “cooperation between the two parties.”

These must be Lieberman supporters.

  • Fifty-five percent think investigations would be “good” for the country; 41 percent think they’d be “bad.”

    I’m wondering why the value labeling? Why not “warranted/unwarrented?” Impeachment, for example, is a painful process for the country to undergo, which some might label as “bad,” but that doesn’t mean that it is not warranted in certain cases.

  • This is really good. For those of you who weren’t around for Watergate, when the investigation began public support was lower than these figures for Democrats investigating Bush. But after it began, and all the weevils started getting knocked out of the crackers (old thing sailors used to have to do, could get pretty gross towards the end of the voyage as thewildlife scattered over the table), public support came around to where there was a majority in favor of impeaching that bastard.

    But we have to remember: Cheney first!! Or just investigate him and keep the pressure up to the point he finally has his fatal heart attack (how he could do that is beyond me, since I see no evidence he has one).

  • Questions about impeachment are pretty much irrelevant at the moment. If I remember correctly, many fewer than 30% of the country thought Nixon should be impeached when the Watergate hearings started. By they time they ended, impeachment was an inevitability.

    Bush has done orders of magnitude more and worse impeachable offenses than Bush. If honest hearings are held into the Bush administration, impeachment will be inevitable. Hearings first. Impeachment will take care of itself.

    Actually, Bush’s best defense against being impeached is probably that he has done so many illegal and unconstitutional things, that two years is insufficient time to investigate them all. As his term draws to a close, there will be a reluctance on the part of Democrats to go after him. IMO, that would be a catastrophic mistake for the country. Part of what created the Bush monster was the failure to punish Nixon for what he did. Bush (others in his administration who are similarly guilty) should be punished to the fullest extent of US and international law. If we do not do that, I believe the next Nixon/Bush that comes along will be the end of the republic (if we have not lost it already).

  • Oops…that should be “Bush has done orders of magnitude more and worse impeachable offenses than Nixon”.

  • Impeachment would not be a wise course. Bush will be a lamer-than-usual duck even if the Republicans keep control; if the Democrats have a majority, what they should do is take action to make Bush look like the obstructionist. This could include minimum wage legislation, serious reform of Medicare Part D, personal development accounts that supplement rather than replace Social Security, restoration of PayGo budgeting… the list is long and appetizing.

    As far as investigations, they should proceed with caution–but proceed nonetheless. My top choice is setting Waxman loose on fraud, waste and theft in both Iraq and the Gulf Coast: it will both generate salutary outrage and expose the vacuity of conservative “governance” for the loot-and-lie exercise it is. Let Cheney ooze out from his lair and defend all his sweetheart deals.

    Screw impeachment; screw Bush. I want to erode the case for electing conservatives to such a degree that they’ll have to fundamentally change their nature or face political death.

  • I like CB’s interpretation….

    I will take his optimism one step further.
    If I was running for office my slogan would be this haiku:

    War criminals all:
    Bush, Cheney, Rummy, and Rove.
    Cinch the rope tight boys…

  • What about congress removing Rumsfeld? I bet most folks would support that, especially after finding out about his refusal to allow planning for post-invasion Iraq.

    Start with the low-hanging fruit.

  • I wonder if that’s Plan C (assuming there is any plan): Create such a huge mess that the folks with the tar and feathers are too busy fixing said mess to sort him out.

    I say wait until they’re out of office and then drag them the through criminal and civil courts until they have third degree rug burn. Just picture any of those goons in prison drag. Mmmm, good!

    By the way, according to Barry Sussman (Special Editor for the Washington Post reporters on the Watergate story), what turned public opinion on Nixon was the news that he’d skipped paying his taxes whilst in California. It wasn’t relevant to the case, but everyone could understand it and it made them angry. It may explain why people slobbered themselves into a frenzy over orgasms in the Oval Office but seem rather numb to the f__kery that goes on in there now.

  • Do I think that GWB has committed impeachable acts? Obviously. As well as criminal actions against both International and our own laws, as well as the Constitution? (When a survey recently asked me about ‘what is the most important issue this year’ and included ‘crime’ I asked her is she included Bush’s actions under that category.)

    Do I think the next, Democratic congress — unless the strategy of personal attacks discussed in thoday’s Washington Post actually works — should investigate the actions of the Bush Administration? Yes. (It beats spending time on phony Constitutional Amendments and banning horsemeat, if nothing else.)

    Do I think that Impeachment proceedings should be started against Bush? I think it would be the most SUICIDAL thing the Democrats could do.

    In the first place, impeach Bush, get Cheney — who has expressed a lot of horrible ideas, but who has been careful not to actually DO anything impeachable. This is NOT an improvement.

    Or even worse, imagine that Cheney has his heart attack, or resigns for whatever reason. Bush nominates his successor, and immediately creates a candidate that will unite the entire Republican party, however anti-Bush they were.

    In 1973, the idea of Gerald Ford as a Presidential candidate in 1976 was ridiculous, even in his own mind. He wouldn’t have carried a single state primary, he didn’t want the job. Then Agnew was caught collecting payoffs in the White House, totally unexpectedly, he resigned, Ford replaced him, and immediately became the Republican front-runner once Nixon was impeached. He probably got extra support from Republicans who had been forced to turn against Nixon because they had the chance to say “see, we’re still believers in Republicanism, we just realized that Nixon was a $@!&^*#.”

    And, desite Watergate, despite The Pardon, Ford almost was elected in 1976.

    Right now, one of our main advantages going into 2008 is the likelihood that the Republican coalition will shatter in an orgy of infighting. (I wouldn’t be surprised if things got so nasty that NO Republican had a majority going into the convention and that, for the first time since 1952, the Convention actually picked the candidate — in fact, this might happen in both parties.) The hawks, the Christians, the Libertarians, the Club for Growth people, all will be blaming the others for the losses the Republicans suffer, and whichever group produces the candidatew, he’s likely to be so extreme that the other groups will sit on their hands — as happened in 1964. (Goldwater may be a hero now, he wasn’t then.)

    There are only two ways we can throw away this advantage. Nominate Hilary, or impeach Bush. Both will bring the Republicans together.

    No, suffer through these last two years, and hope there will be a Constitution and a country left for us to take back. But impeachment — which has to begin in the House, (we may have a majority there in 2007, but it will include a lot of “Blue Dogs”); which will take so long that it will give us only a couple of months without Bush — no, that’s not the way to go.

    But I hope to hell we have somebody out there preparing briefs for a legal case that will put Rumsfeld and Bush literally behind bars for the criminal acts they have committed.

    There’s an even stronger anti-impeachment argument but I’ll put that in another post.

  • I’ve been a Democrat and a proud Liberal all my life, and expect I’ll die one. But sometimes…

    Its been 45-50 years since I watched professional wrestling, but, wtf, we all did things as a kid we are a little ashamed of. And when i did watch it, one of the stock characters was the ‘hero as schnook.’ I remember that one of the prime examples was a guy named Arnold Skoaland. When the promoters had a new villain to introduce, they’d match him against one of these guys on the tv matches.

    His thing was that he always acted like he thought it was a fair fight. He’d be ‘trying to wrestle’ and follow the rules, meanwhile the villain would be choking him, gouging his eyes, hitting him with anything he could get his hands on, and using whatever was his favorite ‘dirty trick.’ And the hero-shnook would beg the referree to notice, but he was always blind.

    Sometime in the match, the villain would step back, put on this ridiculously phony grin, and walk towards the hero-shnook with his arms outstretched. “C’mon, lets be friends, I’ll fight fair from here on. Let’s shake on it.” Of course the entire arena was shouting “DON’T DO IT!!” But the shnook always would, and the villain would promptly kick him in the nuts.

    Sometime I think that when Arnold Skoaland retired from wrestling, he became a consultant for the Democratic Party.

    Look, we’ve watched Karl Rove for years. We’ve seen his tricks. They aren’t new. He does them better than his predecessors like Lee Atwater, sure, but you can look at all the Republican campaigns going back to the McCarthy days, when he managed to get a total idiot like John Marshall Butler elected to the Senate, we can look at the Agnew/Safire campaigns — when they tried to get a Congressman named Rumsfeld into the Senate (and back then, Rumsfeld still had some integrity and was uncomfortable with the type of campaign they tried to run for him).

    We KNOW what he’s going to do, and we fall for it far too often. (Was anybody surprised at the SwiftBoaters? If they were, they’d been asleep for years.) Today the WaPo ran an article detailing exactly how the Republicans were going to fight the election through personal attacks and attempting to define the individual Democrats as the issue, just like always. And yet a number of good candidates will probably lose to the attacks, though hopefully not as many as the Republicans hope.

    And we want to hand him the tool of impeachment proceedings! I could write the script myself. Every Republican, even those who were trying to run away from Bush this election will be claiming that ‘it’s just an attempt to pay the Republicans back for the Clinton Impeachment’ that it’s a ‘legislative coup to attack our form of government.’ And like always, the Democrats will be spending so much time defending against this that the facts of the case will get lost in the shouting.

    Is the claim ridiculous? Of course, but we are in a country and time where the “Three Witches of Slandor” — Malkin, Schlussel and Coulter — are actually viewed as serious political voices. Even now a ridiculous number of people still believe that Saddam plotted 9/11 — even though Bush himself has admitted that there was no connection. People are accusing reporters of treason for revealing things that Al Qaeda knew but the American public didn’t.

    And, unless the Democrats wise up, unless they are ready for this type of campaign, unless they wage preemptive strikes — not trying to ‘out-Rove Rove’ but telling people ‘Look, this is what my opponent is going to try and pull, this is what he’s going to claim. Be ready for the lies and the smokescreen and keep your eyes on the real questions — they are going to be staggering around the ring, looking at the referee and yelling ‘But this isn’t FAIR, he isn’t playing by the rules, do something!’

    Just like Arnold Skoaland.

  • Do you want a “Cut and Run” Democrat a Rebublican?

    If the Republicans play hardball, the Democrats should also.

    Democrat slogans:
    – Cut our losses in Iraq
    – Cut the Health care expenses
    – Cut out abuses by the Bush administration

    – Run the Republicans out of town
    – Run the way a government should be governed – by the people

    To put on the Republican slogans:
    – Cut the taxes for the rich
    – Cut the funding for education, housing and social security
    – Cut out any hope of reduced terrorism

    – Run the government into the ground with huge deficits
    – Run away from confronting real responsibility and culpability

    Add your own!

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