Because We Always Let Our War Criminals Skate

When was the last time America even tried to prosecute our own war criminals?  J. Edgar Hoover died in his bed. Henry Kissinger still walks free and dares to give advice on foreign affairs. Jamie Dimon is still committing the crimes that brought the global economy to its knees.  Exxon-Mobil and BP keep turning the planet into a hellscape that will destroy human civilization. 

And bloody-handed SmirkyDarth goes on book signings.

The Rude Pundit:

Why are we doing this? Why is Bush allowed to go anywhere without crowds pelting his car with shit and rotten tomatoes and eggs? Why aren't there riots at his book signings, demanding his arrest for crimes against humanity? Why hasn't he been run so far out of any town that he has to live in an underground bunker so that the angry masses don't tear him limb from limb? Are we that brain-damaged a nation that we've forgotten? Are we that delusional that we can't just say, endlessly, "Shut the fuck up," and mean that we never want to hear from him again until we all jubilantly join hands and do a crazy jig on his grave?

QOTD

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

I’ll say this about Nixon: he was wrong, crooked, and vile in a great many ways—but on his worst day, he was better than George W. Bush.

"Recount": Never Forget

I finally watched "Recount" a few hours ago. I'm still shaking with rage.

I avoided it for years because I could barely think about what happened in November and December 2000 without screaming in fury. Watching a movie about it would kill me for sure.

But now my rage is for what it still happening today, and what will most certainly happen again unless we carve deep in our guts with hot brands the lessons of 2000:

• Politics is a fight to the death. Doubt it? Ask the 3,000 people who died in the towers, the 4,200 American troops who died in Iraq and the 2,000 American troops who died in Afghanistan because Al Gore gave up.

• Repugs will steal every single election we let them steal. They fight dirty, and they cannot be stopped with anything less than all-out war.  

• Everyone who is not fighting like a rabid ferret for every single vote is a liability, if not an outright enemy.

•  The law is not our friend. The courts are not our friend. The Constitution is not our friend. The media is not our friend. We have only one friend: the people who vote Democratic. We must cherish them, cultivate them, grow them, protect them. They are the only thing standing between us and chaos.

Never. Fucking. Forget.

Smirky and the Repugs Owe You $8.7 Trillion

Don't vote for a single one of them until they pay up in full.

Kevin Drum:

A few days ago the Congressional Budget Office released a short analysis explaining why the $5.6 trillion surplus they projected for the decade following 2001 instead turned into a $6.1 trillion deficit. Bruce Bartlett summarizes:

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 — enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.

Even if we absolve George W. Bush of responsibility for those "economic and technical factors" — mainly the Great Recession — his policies are still responsible for a turnaround of about $8.4 trillion in the deficit projections. In other words, if we had merely hung onto the policies of the Clinton administration, paid for things like Medicare Part D, and avoided the disastrous war in Iraq, we would have entered the Great Recession with one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world. That in turn would probably have kept the housing bubble a bit smaller than it was, making the Great Recession a little less catastrophic, and would have given us more headroom for fiscal stimulus in 2008 and 2009, which also would have reduced both the length and depth of the recession.

But none of that happened thanks to Republican economic policies. This year, they swear they've learned their lesson and will never do this again. Do you believe them?

Not until they pay up, that's for sure. $8.7 trillion ought to be a stretch even for all of Willard's billionaire buddies put together.

Who's a Big Spender?

The Big Spender is definitely not the president who's trying to slash spending rather than increase spending to create jobs.

I say take this administration gets to spend as much as it wants on job-creating, home-saving stimulus until it matches what Smirky-Darth pissed away.

$4 trillion in economy-saving stimulus or a global depression that will make the Depression seem like the '90s prosperity.

Should be a no-brainer.

Normalizing Bush

Along with codifying the unconstitutional indefinite detention at Guantanamo, allowing the Bush tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy to become permanent, the reauthorization of the Fourth-Amendment-shredding components of the Patriot Act and the establishment of permanent war, this is just more "normalizing Bush."

But it's not being done by the usual bush apologist suspects - it's being done by a "Democratic" president and a "Democratic" Senate.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Will Bunch at Attytood catches something that's pretty disconcerting:

This is simply unconscionable:

“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he told troops at Camp Victory, the largest U.S. military outpost in Baghdad. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”

His statement echoed comments made by Bush and his administration, which tried to tie then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. But it put Panetta at odds with Obama, the 9/11 Commission and other independent experts, who have said that al-Qaeda lacked a presence in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Pressed by reporters to elaborate, Panetta said: “I wasn’t saying, you know, the invasion — or going into the issues or the justification of that. It was more the fact that we really had to deal with al-Qaeda here; they developed a presence here and that tied in.” His aides then intervened and shooed the press corps away.

The Big Lie -- that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 -- led to the senseless death of tens of thousands of people, including more than 4,000 Americans. It's every bit as outrageous when Obama pick Leon Panetta tells it as when Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and their Fox and Friends spread around the first time.

Is it too late to bring Robert Gates back?

Manipulative lie, or slip of the tongue?

Digby has flashbacks of Commander Codpiece:

The new Secretary of Defense speaks to the troops in Iraq:

“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” Panetta told the troops. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.

I anxiously await word on the status of all those drones that were coming over the oceans to drop anthrax all over our children as they sleep. What's up with that anyway?

Liberals remember, keep and cherish historical facts, not the lies the powerful find convenient.

America's Divine Right of (Republican) Kings

"But where says some is the King of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other." - Thomas Paine

"the very definition of a republic is an empire of laws, and not of men. . . . that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of law, is the best of republics." - John Adams

"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor." - Teddy Roosevelt

After the Abu Graib torture and NSA domestic spying scandals failed to faze fanatic Smirky/Darth supporters, I said that such people would still worship Bush even if they saw him ass-rape a five-year-old live on national television.

Boy it really pisses me off when my best hyperbole is trumped by reality.

Glenn Greenwald brings his patented eloquent outrage to the insistence by the Beltway Media Villagers that no crime is terrible enough to justify forcing high government officials to be prosecuted for breaking the law.

It just cannot be said enough that our political elites truly do believe that "law" is only for the dirty, filthy masses -- but not for them. It really is that explicit. Joan Walsh was on Howie Kurtz's CNN show yesterday and the other guests -- The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza and former Bush speechwriter David Frum -- responded to her like she was from Neptune all because she repeatedly made one point -- torture is against the law and therefore those who ordered it, by definition, committed crimes. This is a point they literally could not comprehend. That's because they reject the necessary premise in which this simple proposition is grounded: that political leaders are bound by what we call "law." The reason we have become the country we've become is because we've fallen all the way down to Jon Meacham and David Broder from what, at least in principle, used to guide us.

SNIP

If one surveys the wreckage that has become our political class, this explains much of it: we've gone from Paine ("so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is King") and Adams ("an empire of laws, and not of men") and Roosevelt ("No man is above the law") to Newsweek and Jon Meacham ("That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law") and David Broder (holding leaders accountable for lawbreaking is ugly, destructive, populist vengeance except when it involves a sex scandal).

It's difficult to imagine how nauseated (though perhaps not surprised) people like Paine and Adams would be if they would have known that, a mere 230 years later, we'd have as opinion-making elites people like David Broder and Jon Meacham declaring that "presidents and vice presidents are [not] always above the law" -- this is the American President we're talking about; criminal prosecutions are inappropriate for his crimes-- as though that theoretical concession represents the reasonable, centrist, responsible view rather than the authoritarian, lawless, establishment-revering, deeply un-American tripe that it is.

Read the whole thing.

Torture is for Perverts

People who defend torture are perverts who can't get it up without witnessing or imagining someone screaming in pain from unspeakable torture.

From McClatchy:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation -- widely considered torture -- as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

People who defend torture are perverts who can't get it up without witnessing or imagining someone screaming in pain from unspeakable torture.

From the New York Times:

"In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved -- not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said."

People who defend torture are perverts who can't get it up without witnessing or imagining someone screaming in pain from unspeakable torture.

Steve Benen on how even the best evidence the torture perverts can muster in their defense is a complete lie.

The terrorist plot against the Library Tower is the loyal Bushies' favorite. Indeed, Thiessen has used it in more than one Washington Post op-ed, and it's been repeated by Bush administration officials many, many times over the years. Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have even told the story on several occasions, citing it as proof that their abusive tactics were a success (the former president would often call the Library Tower the "Liberty Tower")
.
The entire claim has been exposed as dubious over the years, but as long as torture apologists are going to keep bringing it up, it's probably worth taking a moment to periodically set the record straight.

SNIP

Remember, according to Bush, Cheney, and their most ardent supporters, the thwarted "plot" against the Library Tower is the single best piece of evidence that torture -- waterboarding, in specific -- saved American lives.

Demagogic hyperbole notwithstanding -- "a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York" -- the claim is bogus.

Read the whole thing.

People who defend torture - even after all that and much, much more - are perverts who can't get it up without witnessing or imagining someone screaming in pain from unspeakable torture.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Why Didn't the Curse Get Bush?

A piece in Slate speculates on how George W. Bush escaped the Curse of Tecumseh.

The history, at least, is straightforward enough. Starting with William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, eight American presidents elected at 20-year intervals have died (or almost died) in office. Harrison caught a cold and expired after just a month as president, the shortest tenure ever. Everyone knows what happened to Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860. James Garfield, elected in 1880, lasted four months before Charles J. Guiteau, upset about not receiving an ambassadorship, shot him. William McKinley, re-elected in 1900, was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Warren G. Harding (1920) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940) died of natural causes. And the circumstances of John F. Kennedy's death, like those of Lincoln's, are well-known.

So what of this Tecumseh guy? In 1811, Harrison, commanding about 1,000 troops, defeated some American Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Depending on who tells the tale, either Tecumseh, the defeated chief, or his brother, the prophet-cum-medicine man Tenskwatawa, issued a spiritual fatwa on the head of Harrison, predicting his death as president and then the deaths of presidents elected every two decades thereafter.

It concludes that Bush may have broken the curse which was, in any case, severely bent by Ronald Reagan's survival of an assassination attempt in 1981.

I disagree.

Personally, I never wanted to see Smirky/Darth assassinated, as such events tend to create martyrs out of the most undeserving victims. But if Bush had succumbed slowly, painfully and publicly of some horrific venereal disease I probably wouldn't have mourned much.

No, Smirky didn't break the curse. The curse didn't apply to him because he wasn't elected in 2000 - he was put in office through a judicial coup d'etat. The man who actually was elected president in 2000 never served in the office, and therefore the curse didn't apply to him, either.

If the curse is real, whoever's elected in 2020 is still at risk.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Correcting the Revisionism: No, Virginia, Dubya's Not a Hero

Being nice to the retarded kid who's moving out of town is one thing: flaying history and reality alive in an attempt to make the retarded kid sound like Einstein is something else entirely.

The indispensable Rude Pundit catches it and exposes every criminal lie.

You remember how, right after the 9/11 attacks, we were all scared shitless and the White House was telling us to stick our heads between our legs and kiss our asses good-bye because brownish people were going to fuck our shit up with their exploding shoes and nuclear suitcases o' doom? ... You remember all that? That sense of panic and imminent demise? Yeah, well, fuck you, 'cause you're wrong. It was actually a serene time.

At least according to Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs, who, during Tuesday's military parade in "appreciation" of President George W. Bush, said in his lubricious hummer of a speech, "After this nation was attacked by a rising evil, the same evil which later murdered many others in places like London, Madrid, Islamabad and Mumbai, you quickly led us from the grip of fear to a serenity of purpose and unity of action - serenity well beyond our dreams on September 12th, when all thought further attack was not only likely, but gravely imminent. And through your vision, a new national security was rendered to reach our enemies where they hid and trained and celebrated deadly crimes."

Now that's some motherfucking historical revisionism: the man who pogo-sticked around the country on September 11, 2001 like a hyperactive toddler on the run from the boogeyman actually was achieving some kind of Zen state of retarded enlightenment that allowed him to clear his head and pronounce, "I'm gonna attack a country that had nothing to do with those planes." Seriously, this is like a rapist-murderer being honored for his belief in safe sex.

This crap has just started. Every move President Obama makes will be met with a fairy tale of how the heroic and divine Dubya handled a much greater difficulty so brilliantly, every setback met with fantasies of how every bad thing could have been avoided if only the perfect 43 were still in charge.

Dismissing it as the ravings of the criminally insane will only allow the poisonous meme to survive and thrive, until it is enshrined in our grandchildren's textbooks.

Don't wait until it's too late. Fight the historical revisionism wherever you find it. Memorize and repeat this mantra:

George W. Bush is a war criminal who shredded the Constitution, ruined the military, smashed the economy, accelerated environmental collapse and damn-near destroyed the country.

Read the Rude One's whole rant. X-rated.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

The View from Europe

El Desaparecido

(WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 28, 2009) The Obama administration refused again today to confirm or deny rumors that it has secretly detained former president George W. Bush as an enemy combatant.

Mr. Bush, 62, disappeared five weeks ago shortly after Mr. Obama's inauguration. He boarded Marine One at the White House to fly to Crawford, Texas, but never arrived at the faux ranch that has been on the market since November 5.

His absence went unnoticed and unremarked by even his family and closest friends, however, until yesterday.

"We've all just been so busy decorating the new house," former first lady Laura Bush, sounding uncharacteristically relaxed, said by satellite phone from Asuncion, Paraguay. "I'm sure he'll turn up soon."

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh accused President Obama of ordering military forces to spirit former president Bush to a secret prison and prevent him from communicating with anyone outside the prison.

"Don't be ridiculous," said Attorney General John Edwards. "It's unconstitutional to imprison American citizens indefinitely without charges."

"Not since Padilla and al Marri!" spat Berkely Law School professor John Yoo. "Just last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed the president's right to declare any citizen an enemy combatant and imprison that citizen without charges, forever if he wants!"

A bemused-looking General Edwards responded: "Really?"

In other White House news, last night a weighted Starbucks Travel Cup was thrown through a window in the residence. The Secret Service determined the cup did not present a threat, but declined to comment further. White House insiders, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss premium lattes, claimed the cup had an attached note which read:

Dear Barack, All is Forgiven. Love, The Left.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Obama Should Do What Bush Did

Here's hoping Obama follows George Bush's example as President.

Campaign as a centrist, moderate, new kind of politican, then turn around and govern to the far extreme of his own party.

(Although what the MSM labels "extreme left" is actually the real "center" because it's what the majority of Americans have been telling pollsters they want for a couple of decades now.)

I'm fine with Obama playing nice with the DINOs and Blue Dogs right up through November 4, as long as first thing in the morning November 5, he tells them:

"Thanks for your votes, bitches; now sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up."

I want to hear an Inaugural Address that demolishes Reagan/Bush America in a single blow. I want Obama to announce:

• Immediate Withdrawal from Iraq
• Eliminate Aid to Pakistan Until They Cough Up Bin Laden
• Get Reparations from Saudi Arabia for 9-11 (15 of 19 terrorists, remember?)
• Single-Payer Health Insurance
• Double the Minimum Wage
• Promote Unionization
• Progressive Taxation - Soak the Rich
• Repeal NAFTA and CAFTA
• Repeal Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, FISA and every other law that infringes on civil liberties
• Restore the Clean Air, Clean Water and Superfund Acts and fully fund their implementation
• $1 Trillion Crash Program to Rebuild Nation's Infrastructure
• $1 Trillion Crash Program to Replace Fossil Fuels with Renewables (Not Nuclear)
• Outlaw Vote ID requirements
• Cancel the Drug War and use the money to create 10 million treatment beds.
• Eliminate Aid to Israel until they abandon all the West Bank settlements and cut a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians.

And I almost forgot:

• Arrest George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, and Alberto Gonzales, charge them with treason, convict their guilty asses and throw them in a SuperMax prison for the rest of eternity.

I want Obama to lean on Congress so hard he makes the Full Johnson seem like an air kiss. I want him to make Blue Dogs such pariahs that even lobbyists won't speak to them. I want him to appoint federal judges so liberal they make Dennis Kucinich look conservative. I want Antonin Scalia's head to explode. I want Samuel Alito sobbing in despair on national television. I want Clarence Thomas to get "race traitor" tattooed on his forehead.

If Obama does all that, I'll forgive him every stupid, self-destructive, un-democratic campaign pander.

That's hypocrisy I can get behind.

(No, I don't think Obama's going to announce all that, much less actually do it. But I am sure he's going to get miles closer to those goals than McCain would.)

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Sex and the Torturing Politican

Twenty years ago this Sunday, a Miami Herald reporter got a phone call and the rules of political campaigns changed forever.

When Tom Fiedler's phone rang the evening of April 27, 1987, he thought it might be another crank call, the kind political reporters get all the time. But Fiedler, a veteran campaign chronicler for the Miami Herald, couldn't ignore the caller's message: "Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine."

Hart's inexcusable stupidity - he actually dared reporters to follow him - set a new standard for political coverage: sex lives are fair game.

The Clinton impeachment a decade later may seem to be the apotheosis of that standard, but in fact it was its nadir; it made most people realize that a politician's consensual adult sex really wasn't as important as how he did his job.

In Kentucky, Governor Paul Patton provided the egregious example of a public official who let his dick affect his job performance; he gave his mistress Tina Connor sweetheart contracts and regulatory exemptions for her businesses. His real crime, however, was that the exposure of his malfeasance led directly to the election of Republican Criminal Ernie Fletcher.

But it wasn't until the American people got collectively though metaphorically ass-raped by a frat-boy with arrested development who has probably never cheated on his wife that we really understood the moral calculus of presidential flaws.

In a president, which is preferable? Discreet extramarital affairs with consenting adults or treating the Constitution as toilet paper?

Let me put it more baldly: rather than a "good Christian" sociopathic failure bent on destroying the nation in a futile attempt to out-macho his father and who gets his jollies personally approving sexual torture of innocents, I'll take a homosexual, atheist, liberal, feminist, elitist, UN-loving, business-hating, gun-confiscating abortionist any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Better Late Than Never

Josh Marshall, Founder of the Talking Points Memo Empire, and one of the most eloquent progressive skeptics on impeachment, appears to finally be coming around.

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn't apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we're moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I'm less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of 'normal politics' is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.

I've been a loyal TPM fan since 2001, when it was a one-man, bare-bones blog, just a few months old. TPM Cafe, Election Central, Horse's Mouth, Muckraker, TPMTv and the staff that keep TPM at the top of the blogging game were not even gleams in Josh's eye.

Yeah, he's always been a little too fond of the DLC line than I liked, but I was thrilled by the reporter's sensibility he brought to his posts - a sensibility now grown into the major-story-breaking hard news of TPMMuckraker.

And for all his DLC apologia, liberals and progressives owe Josh Marshall a permanent debt of gratitude for putting a stop, virtually single-handedly, to The Usurper's 2005 attempt to destroy Social Security.

I thought Josh was wrong when he expressed doubts about the wisdom of impeaching Bush and Cheney, but I respected his logic.

I respect him even more for his ability to consider changing his mind based on new evidence and circumstances.

Nevertheless, I think he's missing one of the strongest arguments in favor of impeachment: Nixon.

Josh is 38, which means he was in kindergarten during Watergate. I was only in high school, but I remember the extreme shock felt by people of all political persuasions when the full extent of Nixon's crimes were laid bare.

I remember the heart-swelling pride in the strength of our political system when Congressional Republicans and Democrats banded together to expose those crimes and demand the president be held accountable.

I remember my father - a third-generation Republican - and my mother, a sixth-generation Democrat - both emphasizing to me that the true lesson of Watergate was that the U.S. Constitution was stronger than any politican, stronger than any president, stronger than any crime perpetrated against it.

And I remember how all that shock, all that pride, all that faith in the Constitution was swept away by Gerald Ford's pardon.

Nixon skated. The man shat on the Constitution, came within a whisker of establishing a police state that put the East German Stasi to shame, and he skated.

The precedent for The Usurper's treason was established.

Reagan and Bush I used it to escape punishment for Iran-Contra (Presidents are above the law.) And the republican freakazoids of the '90s turned it inside-out to impeach Clinton for telling a lie told by thousands of married people every single day (Impeachment isn't a serious Constitutional mechanism; it's a political tool.)

If Nixon had been impeached, or indicted and convicted for his crimes after his resignation, it would have been much harder for Reagan and Bush I to resist Congressional investigation through secrecy and perjury. It would have been much harder for '90s republicans to justify using the Constitutional majesty of impeachment for a fib about sex.

And it would have been damn-near impossible for George W. Bush and Richard Cheney to continue to trample the Constitution for more than five years after a pre-Nixon Congress would have kicked their asses into the dustbin of history.

If Congress doesn't impeach Bush and Cheney - or given the time constraints, indict and convict them after they leave office - it won't matter who's elected president in 2008. It won't matter if Democrats take the Senate and House with 80-percent majorities. It won't matter if the republican party is shut out of every national, state and local election for the next three generations.

If Bush and Cheney skate, an even more dangerous precedent than Nixon's will be set in stone:

The president is King; Congress is a debating club; the judiciary is a joke; the Constitution is as dead as Ozymandias, and The American Experiment is a historical fluke that failed.