Christopher Caldwell in The Spectator is predicting that the impending Republican loss of the House will bring Impeachment from a gesture by the democrat party’s activist extreme to actual application by a newly empowered House majority.

Until recently, the move to impeach Bush was confined to the Democratic party’s cranky fringe. The city council of Santa Cruz, California, the country’s marijuana Mecca, has urged the President’s impeachment since his first term. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has recommended an impeachment inquiry, as have Democratic parties in Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin. So have the retired Manhattanites who style themselves the Vermont State Legislature, and the village of Nederland, Colorado, a member in good standing of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns. Neil Young has released a song called ‘Impeach the President’. Being able to express one’s views on such matters is ‘what this country’s all about’, says Mr Young, a Canadian. Ramsey Clark, a veteran of both Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet and Saddam Hussein’s legal defence team, has his own impeachment website.

Ordinarily, you need a crime to remove a president from office. But the question of what one should impeach Bush for has not preoccupied his opponents unduly. Most often the charges levelled involve Iraq and the war on terror. Bush lied to get the country into war, say his detractors. He countenances torture. His plan for warrantless wiretaps of al-Qa’eda has compromised the privacy of countless ordinary Americans who receive calls in Arabic via portable satellite phone from tribal areas of the Hindu Kush.

But since last winter the movement to be rid of Bush by extra-democratic means has won converts among intellectuals — including former Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham and the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe — and in the Democratic party’s mainstream. Al Gore now seldom gives a speech in which he does not allude to the wiretaps. At a Christmas party in Finn McCool’s, a bar near the US Senate, John Kerry told several veterans of his 2004 campaign, ‘If we win back the House, I think we have a pretty solid case to bring articles of impeachment against this President.’

Get ready for an ugly 2007.

I spend too much time every day arguing politics with college classmates via email. Reading some of today’s messages, I feel moved to ask: what is “liberalism,” really?

One could try to identify its ideological components, but it can be wildly inconsistent, and I think it is both more economical and more accurate simply to identify “liberalism” as identical to the consensus of the American elite, based upon the perspectives and assumptions, and the values and agenda, articulated by its own representatives in the establishment media.

Where the Right and the Left really disagree, I would contend, is on the credence, loyalty, and respect due to that consensus.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, and prominent public spokesman of the Pouting Spooks Against the Bush Administration, went postal in the Baltimore Sun yesterday, denouncing George W. Bush as a Jacobin and a revolutionary, precisely because Bush has spurned the consensus of the elect.

I think Wilkerson’s editorial was ideationally confused and stylistically turgid, but his piece does, nonetheless, still eloquently and accurately express his own indignation, and that of his class, at the rejection by George W. Bush (and an alternative American leadership) of the intellectual consensus (and the organic process continually manufacturing it) on which both the very identity, and the basic mechanisms of perceiving reality, of the American establishment are based.

Wilkerson is right to feel that Bush and his associates have dared to enter the temple and lain violent hands upon the idols.

Wilkerson emoting earlier on the same theme.

Charles Johnson found a hilarious profile in the Washington Post, which really paints an only too recognizable a portrait of the angry left blogger:

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. — In the angry life of Maryscott O’Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O’Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O’Connor’s reputation is as one of the angriest of all. “One long, sustained scream” is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers “malevolent,” a “sociopath” and “the Antichrist”? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as “Satan,” or about Karl Rove, “the devil”? Should it be about the “evil” Republican Party, or the “weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving” Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says “I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned”?

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

“Darfur is not hopeless,” she begins typing, and pauses.

“Ugh,” she says.

“You are not helpless,” she continues typing, and pauses again.

“Weak.”

She deletes everything and starts over.

“WAKE THE [expletive] UP,” she writes next, and this time, instead of pausing, she keeps going, typing harder and harder on a keyboard that is surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, a can of nonalcoholic beer, an album with photos of her dead father and a taped-up note — staring at her — on which she has scrawled “Why am I/you here?”

I read their stuff all the time, and this description rings true to me. Read the whole thing.

History has not treated the Green Mountain State very kindly.

In the 19th century, freedom-loving Vermonters flocked to fight against Slavery in the War Between the States in such numbers, and fought so bravely, that the state’s population was significantly reduced. Previously an industrial power, Vermont entered into a period of long decline, ultimately becoming a quaint backwater, a kind of reservation of old-fashioned Yankee culture.

The rise of Environmentalism and the Counterculture in the last century, brought even worse disaster to Vermont, in the form of an invasion: an invasion of goat-milking hippies, trust-fund revolutionaries, and back-to-the-land tree huggers, who arrived in numbers adequate to transform the Granite state’s ethos from the rock-ribbed Republican spirit of self reliance formerly epitomized by Calvin Coolidge into the rich guy Bolshevism represented by Ben & Jerry.

Today scrofulous beatniks misuse the traditional Vermont town meeting to make pretentious political statements and strike leftist poses. The latest fad is for Vermont town meetings, as in Newfane voting under the leadership of some pony-tailed musician-cum-antiques-restorer, to call for President Bush’s impeachment.

It’s not only in town meetings trying to set national policy though that Vermont feels the impact of the invasion of the crunchies. The leftist flatlanders brought their own big spending approach to local politics along as well. These days Vermont ranks right at the top nationally in per capita taxation.

Ethan Allen must be spinning in his grave.

Kevin Aylward comments on the Associated Press’s retraction following the blogosphere’s demolition of its resurrected Hurricane Katrina news meme. It was just another case of news manipulation in the cause of Bush-bashing.

Daniel Henninger identifies the cynical political game that’s being played in the MSM:

Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

There was a time when what’s been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn’t bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event — large, small, in between — plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader’s desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this “is part of the secretive nature of this administration…

If it all seems more than a little tiresome, if you wish it would all just go away, well, maybe that’s the point — their point. Induce swing voters to seek respite from the Bush experience.

As the chart nearby indicates, the public’s allegiance to the two parties is remarkably tight. Thus, anything the Democrats can do to push up their number or push down the Republicans’ materially enhances their chances in this November’s elections and in 2008 — and prevents the onset of a long majority for the GOP of the sort McKinley triggered in 1896. Yes, there will be no Bush-Cheney in 2008, but they’re useful as a wedge to redirect voter preferences.

Absent any fresh or positive message for voters, why not try winning by turning politics under the Republicans into an experience of unrelenting discomfort? The substance of any given issue falls in importance. Connecting Jack Abramoff to George Bush personally was always a stretch. So what?

The most telling evidence of a strategy of discomfiting the body politic was the January bonfire over terrorist wiretaps. Here the opposition shrieked for days about a “constitutional crisis” even as polls were indicating public support for the Bush program, including 28% who would OK tapping anyone’s phone “on a regular basis” to catch terrorists.

Parties don’t sail against the polling winds. Why this time? Because come November, the “wiretaps” will sit in many voters’ minds not as a debate over Article II but as part of what feels to them like endless “bad news.” The press’s supersizing of the Cheney shooting may look like excess. So what? No matter how voters feel on any one issue — terror, the courts, values — the Democrats, event after event, are building the feeling that the Bush-Cheney presidency and GOP Congress have somehow been 40 miles of bad road…

..collaborating with a willing media to market the opposition party as a haunted house is a cynical, wholly reductionist strategy, with nothing in it for the public good. It dumbs down our politics. As shown with Social Security reform, the system ceases to function. A major U.S. foreign-policy initiative like the Bush Doctrine has to be delegitimized with no serious opposition support at any level. This is the strategy of the phalanx, not politics. If it works, the other side will surely run the same tar-and-pitch strategy against a new Clinton presidency. It deserves to fail.

The democrats have been out of ideas for a long time, and are permanently tied to a radical base reliably functioning as an electoral albatross. The rise of alternative media (AM talk radio, Fox news) and the conservative blogosphere were important blows to their information monopoly, but Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina proved the MSM could still utilize moving images to frame reality in their own terms, and to inflict serious political damage.