The Toxic Administration

Ken Mehlman is worried.

For those of you who are not C-SPAN junkies, Mehlman is the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (the Howard Dean of the GOP, in other words). He's not happy with all this talk about censure and impeachment. He's not happy at all.

In fact, he sent out an e-mail to all his little minions out there in Limbaughland decrying the Dems and their terrible, horrible, unpatriotic plans to unseat the president of this great land.

This is what he said:

"The word is out. Their position is clear. Last week, Sen. Russ Feingold floated a reckless plan to censure the President, and some Democrat leaders have ecstatically jumped on Feingold's bandwagon.

And, if they gain even more power in November, they won't stop there.

Feingold says that censure actually represents "moderation" and calls the terrorist surveillance program an impeachable offense. Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, fails to rule out impeachment if Democrats retake Congress. Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin is talking "high crimes and misdemeanors." And 31 House Democrats are calling for a committee to look into impeachment. Their leader? John Conyers, who would become House Judiciary Committee chairman under Democrat control.

The Democrats' plan for 2006? Take the House and Senate, and impeach the President. With our nation at war, is this the kind of Congress you want?"

You can practically see him pulling bricks out of his pants, can't you?

Is censure "reckless"? Frankly it strikes me as too little, too late.

The fact is that this administration, and the Republican Party in general, is falling apart faster than a house of cards in a hurricane -- and Ken Mehlman gets the dubious privlege of presiding over the devastation. So naturally he's inclined to bitch and moan about it. Wouldn't you?

But the funny thing is that Democrats -- the elected kind, that is -- are not all that crazy to talk about impeachment either. That will change after the midterm elections, provided they win back control of Congress, but for right now they're being cautious. They don't want to get ahead of themselves.

My feeling is that the country as a whole is way ahead of the elected officials when it comes to impeachment. They know what's been happening in this country for the past three years, and they're genuinely upset about it. They have seen this administration open up concentration camps and torture prisoners. They've seen them act as the aggressor in attacking a nation that posed no imminent threat to them, for the most puerile of reasons (to unseat the man "that tried to kill my dad"). They've seen them take the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and stuff them into a paper shredder. And they want the men responsible for that out of office as quickly as possible.

This administration is toxic, and it's only a matter of time before those who are responsible are held to account.

So if I was Ken Mehlman, I'd stock up on the Xanax and the Depends and polish up my resume.

Tom Moran

(Thanks to Deanna Zandt of AlterNet for the Mehlman quote.)