Impeachment Watch ISince impeach Bush seems to be the platform the Democrats are going to run on, rather than, you know, the vision thing, I thought I'd start a regular post on the impeachment front.
Hugh Hewitt
interviewed Rosa Brooks a law school professor and LA Times columnist on her reasons for impeachment.
RB: You could have a long list. To me, actually, the latest scandal, the NSA wiretapping scandal, is in some ways, the least of it. It seems to me that that looks more like a technicality than for instance, possibly deliberately misleading people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, potential violation of federal law on interrogations and detentions policy, and speaking specifically of the torture statute in the war crimes statute. You could go on. Other people have tried to compile lists. I'm not an impeachment hobbyist. It's not my hobby.Of course she's not, she's just writing a column out her rear end. Deliberately misleading people about WMD in Iraq? Does she have a specific incident in mind?
Hugh does an excellent job of painting her into a corner:
HH: But let's focus on, from the December 30th's column, the paragraph, the NSA's domestic surveillance program is not the only impeachable offense with which the president could be plausibly charged. That does imply you do believe it is an impeachable offense.
RB: Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think on its...I think that that's a separate question from whether he would in the end be found guilty and removed from office. But when Hugh starts pressing her on case law, she backtracks:
RB: Well, you know, Hugh, I mean, you've got the case law at your fingertips, and I'm not going to challenge you on it, because I don't. And this is actually why, as I said a few minutes ago, this seems like the least of it to me. I mean, this seems to me to be an open question. You know, I'm not an expert on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the case law behind it. I don't know.The old "I'm not an expert on FISA, but this seems to me a clear violation, unless of course it isn't, in which case, never mind," dodge.
Deb Saunders takes up the FISA thing and chides
Jonathan Alter a bit.
As Alter wrote after the story broke that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international calls in efforts to uncover possible agents of al Qaeda, "Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974."
Angry leftists are so hysterical that they cannot distinguish between government agents eavesdropping on a president's political enemies, and the data mining of international phone calls in an earnest effort to thwart another Sept. 11 terrorist attack. They don't see that Bush, rather then trying to hide his role in the effort, signed off on the program more than 30 times.
