Impeachment talk started on the left not long before Xmas: example, example2.

Responding, the New York Post today proposed another discussion meme: Treason.

Curmudgeonly & Skeptical investigates Judge James Robertson.

The conclusion is:

Looks like the Robertson’s only purpose in life was to keep Clintonistas out of jail.

Hat Tip to SondraK.

Editor & Publisher notes the appearance of impeachment talk recently in connection with the NASA flap all over the outposts of the leftwing commentariat:

NEW YORK Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the “I” word, or at least the “IO” phrase: impeach or impeachable offense.

The sudden outbreak of anger or candor has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting.

Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as “Hutch” to the president), observed that “some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.” Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news.

Newsweek online noted a “chorus” of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are “calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The ‘I-word’ is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.”

Make no mistake. The level of the tactics of opposition the left is willing to resort to has increased continually over the last few decades with their ever growing frustration at political losses. These days, we see the Senate filibuster applied not just for the kind of primal confrontations which used to lead opponents in the major parties to die in the last ditch efforts. Today every significant mildly controversial bill, every tax cut, every presidential legislative initiative will reliably be filibustered.

We have reached a point of political opposition in which, if the weapon is available, the democrat opposition will use it.

The Bush Administration had better realize that it has only to lose control of the House of Representative in 2006, and they can bet that the NASA Flap or any later equivalent issue which can be inflated into a major scandal by the loving attentions of the democrat party’s MSM allies will be employed as a pretext for the Impeachment card to be played. The Left still believes it deserves revenge for the Clinton Impeachment, and for what it insists on looking upon as two “stolen” elections. The actual facts, fair play and intellectual honesty will have nothing to do with it. Lose the House and it will be Sauve qui peut! for the Bush Administration.

Since we could very well lose the House, if I were advising George W. Bush, I would tell him to fire that wimp Karl Rove, and get himself what is referred to in The Godfather as a war-time consigliere. The Bush Administration is being gradually brought down by the political equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts, by an endless succession of leaks and accusations. The opponents of the administration just keep throwing this one at the wall, and that one, to see which one is going to stick, and serve as the basis for a good old-fashioned Watergate-style scandal which can bring down the Administration.

Over four years, any endlessly repeated political initiative has a pretty decent probability of bearing fruit. As we have editorialized before, just like a football team, either an Administration is on the offensive or it is on the defensive. The only effective response to the calculated politics of scandal is to retaliate in kind more effectively. It’s not as if the opportunity does not exist. You have an active conspiracy of disgrunted former, and still active, Intelligence Community personnel leaking the most sensitive kinds of intelligence information for political purposes on time of war. A really aggressive Administration could be indicting people for treason. In this case, it should be entirely adequate to identify, prosecute, and punish some of the principal guilty parties on less extravagant charges.

The Bush Administration could take a leaf from the democrat party’s book, and learn how to use the politics of scandal to its own advantage. Only the politics of mutually assured destruction via scandal is likely to persuade democrats to relinquish ambitions of removing this president from office by impeachment.

The Onion is breaking the latest Bush Administration leak scandal:

Rove Implicated In Santa Identity Leak
December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC—The recent leak revealing Santa Claus to be “your mommy and daddy” has been linked to President Bush’s senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

The Boston Globe is reporting that democrats, especially those seeking office in rural & Western states, are trying to disconnect from support of Gun Control, an issue which has functioned like the bug-zapper at the local Dairy Queen on many democrat hopes:

WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party, long identified with gun control, is rethinking its approach to the gun debate, seeking to improve the chances of its candidates in Western states where hunters have been wary of casting votes for a party with a national reputation of being against guns.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, who had been a critic of some forms of gun control during his tenure as governor of Vermont, has urged candidates to view gun control laws as state issues, allowing those in rural states to reflect the values of hunters and others hostile to gun control, while supporting restrictions in urban areas with serious crime problems.

”On gun rights, we’ve allowed the Republicans to paint us in a way that just doesn’t represent our values,” said Damien LaVera, a Dean spokesman, noting that Republicans have repeatedly portrayed Democrats as hostile to the Western way of life.

George W. Bush came to Washington ambitious to fulfill a promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He had been successful as Governor of Texas in governing in a relationship of cooperation with legislative democrats, and he believed that he could successfully apply his natural amiability and charm to achieving the same kind of good-natured bipartisanship at the national level. George W. Bush was dead wrong. No one in Washington was open to being charmed. The stakes are looked upon as too high, and its adversarial politics are these days professionally conducted on the basis of calculation, not personalities. His political opponents had never accepted the legitimacy of the Bush electoral victory in 2000, and when he easily turned aside what they had fondly believed would amount to a formidable challenge in 2004, they were even more furious.

Bush’s re-election with increased congressional majorities appeared to represent an historic political watershed. The democrat party was seemingly in complete disarray. The liberal establishment’s traditionally decisive weapon of MSM domination had proved astonishingly ineffective during the 2004 campaign. The MSM wouldn’t cover allegations about John Kerry’s military service and awards, and his veteran opponents just published a book which topped the best seller list for weeks. No one had any problem learning what John Kerry’s fellow sailors thought of him. The left tried to turn the tables by producing a Big Story attacking Bush’s military record, and the Blogosphere brought down Dan Rather and humiliated CBS. It looked as if conservative AM talk radio combined with a newly ascendant Blogosphere, operating as alternative information sources, had arrived as the Republican Party’s fully operational ABM system, able to repel and refute MSM attacks, and able as well to launch devastating counterstrikes.

Then came 2005.

No one on the Right foresaw that what the MSM could not do in the 2004 campaign, they could do given a natural disaster to work with.

No one in the Bush camp recognized the possibility that endless repetition of the claim that “Bush lied” would ever succeed in gaining traction beyond the circles of the leftwing lunatic fringe, and rise in the minds of the general public to the level of accepted fact.

No one in the leadership of the Administration seems to have recognized that the executive branch, from the Intelligence Community and the State Department to the Department of Justice, featured significant numbers of entrenched and disgruntled liberal opponents ready to work systematically to bring down the administration from within.

The Bush Administration has stood there, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, doing nothing to save itself, while its pouting spook opponents from the Intelligence Community have run a disinformation operation that has successfully forced the resignation of the Vice Presidential Chief of Staff, and which promises also to “take out” the president’s chief advisor. While this organized group of administration opponents has successfully managed to criminalize disputes over the interpretation of intelligence by promoting a trivial press leak into a major scandal and full-blown criminal investigation, it has also leaked far more substantive and far more damaging information routinely on a weekly basis without the least sign of any administration response.

Bush is about as unpopular as presidents get right now without being impeached. He has an excellent chance of being accorded a place in the history books in the general vicinity of Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon. How many more weekly leakfests does this administration think it can sustain?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Get Porter Goss to swear out a complaint of the violation of intelligence statutes. Find the meanest, and sharpest, and most press-hungry Harvard or Yale Law-educated Republican Appeal Court judge you can find, and get somebody actually on your side in the Justice Department (not the guy who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald), to appoint that man the next Special Council, and let slip the dogs of prosecution.

The President can make the news, you know. Instead of waiting for the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Mr. Zarqawi, to write the weekend’s headlines, why don’t you guys write some yourself? Let’s invade Syria. Just like Iraq’s, the Syrian dictatorship will crumble like a rotten pumpkin with one good kick. There’ll be a lot less insurgency in Iraq, once the Syrian base is out of business. Terrorism all over the Middle East wil be significantly reduced. Maybe Iran will think twice about that nuclear bomb project when they see US tanks rolling through Damascus.

Let’s bomb Al Jazeera. So what if they set up a second operation elsewhere? We do actually have more than two loads of bombs. I bet they run out of broadcasting facilities, before we run out of ordinance.

Your opponents are leaking US Intel secrets like a sieve. Leak some yourself. Tell some war stories. Go on television, show pictures, and tell the people how we caught this really bad guy, or that one, up to some serious form of skulduggery.

You’re getting lots of static about the treatment of terrorist captives and lack of terrorist due process. Let’s have some due process. Put on a show trial. Take one or several murderous jihadist fanatics, from whom we’ve gotten every piece of information we can, put them on trial on television, convict them, and then ceremoniously hang them.

You need better news management. Making a case for the war, making a case for the administration’s policies, needs to be a completely different scale of priority. Our adversaries in the Middle East cannot possibly defeat US military forces in the field, but they can defeat us, and bring about our ultimate humiliation and withdrawal, by winning (with the aid of the domestic left) the battle for control of the US public’s perception of reality. The fight for control of domestic American opinion needs to be understood as absolutely vital to the successs of American arms.

And the active, and skilled, conduct of the battle for public opinion is essential for this administration’s place in history, its effectiveness at governing, and –at this point– its very survival.

The Supreme Court will hear appeals from four plaintiffs’ groups, representing democrats, minorities, the city of Austin, and it surrounding county, of Appeals Court rulings upholding the Republican redrafting of Texas’ congressional districts map.

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes a Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which lists notable CIA failures:

it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11 and Saddam’s WMDs —

and then turns to the most spectacular failure of the Agency: its failure to stop, or punish, some Agency officers’ more-recent activities:

“The CIA’s war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years,” wrote lawyer and Web logger John Hinderaker in The Weekly Standard.

The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the Bush administration by former Democratic officeholders, and permitted a serving analyst, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book bashing the president.

The principal CIA weapon has been the leak. Reporters for ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post didn’t have to do even the minimal legwork Mr. Laurin did to out the CIA’s clandestine “rendition” program. It was handed to them by “current and former intelligence officials.”

“So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to The Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush administration,” Mr. Hinderaker wrote.

A rogue CIA that subverts American democracy has long been a staple of moonbat mythology. How ironic that the rogues in the CIA should turn out to be leftists who harm America to benefit Democrats.

Kelly then refers to a conclusion reached by others:

In the 1990s, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed abolishing the CIA. That seemed far out then. It doesn’t seem so far out now. It might be easier to start from scratch than to clean up the mess the CIA has become.

“The CIA is in deep crisis,” Mr. Hinderaker said. “It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest.”

But the problem is even more extensive. The pouting spooks’ war against the Bush Administration has been being waged simultaneously openly and covertly, since at least the beginning of 2003, when the public announcement of the organization of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) occurred. As we have previously reported:

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

The recent leak involving CIA terrorist renditions to Poland was supplied to the press by Marc Garlasco, currently an analyst with the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, but formerly a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, who resigned shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War.

John Cole has been moving left recently, sharing his blog with moonbat Tim F., and sobbing big, salty tears over American abuse of the poor widdle terrorists, so I reluctantly moved Balloon Juice down to Unsound Blogs to repose with Democratic Underground and Daily Koz. But every now and then, you can look in and find the old John Cole at home. John observed the democrats’ response to the Republican Party white-flag video, and responded thusly today:

Once again, Democrats are furious with the Republican party for ‘misrepresenting’ them and portraying them as wanting to ‘cut and run.’ How has the GOP done this? By taking direct quotes from the DNC Chairman, the House Minority Leader, and the Democratic candidate for President and standard-bearer just a year ago and putting them over top of a person waving a white flag.

Having lobbed that grenade nicely, John climbs back out of the trench and goes home to the enemy again. Poor chap can’t really make up his mind. He’s too smart to be a liberal, but I think he is responding to some kind of social pressure and trying his best.

George Will exposes another spectacular waste of federal tax money: subsidized television upgrades:

Feeling, evidently, flush with (other people’s) cash, the Senate has concocted a novel way to spend $3 billion: create a new entitlement. The Senate has passed — and so has the House, with differences — an entitlement to digital television.

If this filigree on the welfare state becomes law, everyone who owns old analog television sets — everyone from your Aunt Emma in her wee apartment to the millionaire in the neighborhood McMansion who has such sets in the maid’s room and the guest house — will get subsidies to pay for making those sets capable of receiving digital signals….
Remember, although it is difficult to do so, that Republicans control Congress. And today’s up-to-date conservatism does not stand idly by expecting people to actually pursue happiness on their own. Hence the new entitlement from Congress to help all Americans acquire converter boxes to put on top of old analog sets, making the sets able to receive digital programming. All Americans — rich and poor; it is uncompassionate to discriminate on the basis of money when dispersing money — will be equally entitled to the help.

The $990 million House version of this entitlement — call it No Couch Potato Left Behind — is (relatively) parsimonious: Consumers would get vouchers worth only $40 and would be restricted to a measly two vouchers per household. The Senate’s more spacious entitlement would pay for most of the cost — $50 to $60 — of the converter boxes. But there is Republican rigor in this: Consumers would be required to pay $10. That is the conservatism in compassionate conservatism.

Norman Podhoretz views recent liberal panic over the War in Iraq in Washington and in the MSM, analyses the situation, and concludes:

In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq—which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces—cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

The Republican Party has a new video identifying the democrats’ strategy for the War on Terror, titled “Retreat and Defeat.” I particularly liked the old-fashioned line pointing out that “the enemy is watching too.”

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.