TIME TO IMPEACH? CENSURE? INVESTIGATE? SOMETHING? OR DO WE JUST WAIT FOR NOVEMBER?

When I woke up this morning and put on CNN all the mindless chatter was about how the Republicans in Congress were mad at Bush for being such a dismal failure and how the public's increasingly negative perception of him and the job he is doing could lead to staggering losses in the November midterm elections. The solution? The new chief-on-staff, Josh Bolten, who David Gergen kept referring to as "President Bolten" last night (in a dig at Bush's obvious inability to connect-- with anything), will name his own successor as White House Budget Director: Rob Portman. Although an obvious failure at his current position as U.S. Trade Representative, the theory is that Portman is respected and liked from his days as an Ohio congressman and part of the GOP House leadership and for the bang-up job he did helping re-elect Bush in 2004. "Part of the GOP House leadership" means he is a crook connected to his ex-liege lord Tom DeLay and "bang-up job re-electing Bush" means involvement in massive financial and electoral fraud and in the undermining of democracy. Sounds great. I'm sure it will solve all Bush's problems, although CNN's assertions that both sides of the aisle are enamoured of him are somewhat belied by Harry Reid's somewhat unkind reaction to his appointment today. "From record trade deficits to record budget deficits," deadpanned Reid, "Bob Portman should fit right in at George Bush's OMB."

And those problems are mounting. Despite the grotesque and vicious partisan swift-boating all the retired generals who have courageously spoken out against Rumsfeld's incompetent policies in regard to Iraq and the disaster his reign over the Pentagon has been, the public has grown more and more disenchanted with the Bush Regime by the day. Yesterday's VANITY FAIR article by the better half of the Woodward and Bernstein combo that brought down Richard Nixon, won't help.

Essentially, Carl Bernstein is calling for bipartisan hearings to investigate the whole rotten, crumbling edifice of the catastrophic Bush presidency and he's asking if this is the way congressional Republicans can save themselves in November.

In an acknowledged reference to John Dean's prescient book of two years ago, "Worse than Watergate?" are the first 3 words Bernstein uses in his explosive piece. And it gets stronger. "High crimes and misdemeanors justifying the impeachment of George W. Bush, as increasing numbers of Democrats in Washington hope, and, sotto voce, increasing numbers of Republicans— including some of the president's top lieutenants— now fear? Leaders of both parties are acutely aware of the vehemence of anti-Bush sentiment in the country, expressed especially in the increasing number of Americans— nearing fifty percent in some polls— who say they would favor impeachment if the president were proved to have deliberately lied to justify going to war in Iraq... Raising the worse-than-Watergate question and demanding unequivocally that Congress seek to answer it is, in fact, overdue and more than justified by ample evidence stacked up from Baghdad back to New Orleans and, of increasing relevance, inside a special prosecutor's office in downtown Washington."

Bernstein's premise is that it is premature to seriously talk about impeachment-- or even about Russ Feingold's very moderate censure resolution-- until after the Senate vote, "hopefully," he says, "before the November elections, and with overwhelming support from both parties— to undertake a full investigation of the conduct of the presidency of George W. Bush, along the lines of the Senate Watergate Committee's investigation during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon."

He makes the point that the evidence justifying such a bipartisan investigation is overwhelming, and that the public absolutely must learn "what this president and his vice president knew and when they knew it; to determine what the Bush administration has done under the guise of national security; and to find out who did what, whether legal or illegal, unconstitutional or merely under the wire, in ignorance or incompetence or with good reason, while the administration barricaded itself behind the most Draconian secrecy and disingenuous information policies of the modern presidential era."

Bernstein even points at that as big a partisan political hack as Pennsylvania Senator Arlen is howling-- perhaps ominously for Bush, since he is the Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee-- that "We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people. [T]he President of the United States owes a specific explanation to the American people … about exactly what he did."

Bernstein's article is, in essence, demanding-- with subpoena power-- a "trustworthy official record of what has occurred... how decisions were reached, and even what the actual policies promulgated and approved by the president are," in regard to everything from the leaks in the Plame case, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, wholesale N.S.A. domestic wiretapping in contravention of specific prohibitive law, the decisions to attack Iraq to "some of the more questionable policies and conduct of this presidency, even those that turned a natural disaster in New Orleans into a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect." He seems more than a little pissed off at what he terms "the routine disregard for truthfulness in the dissemination of information to the American people and Congress."

Yes, quite a bit more than a little pissed off. "The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and about the president, the vice president, and their political and national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice, to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed."

Perhaps not taking into account the intense partisanship that the extreme right has used first to take over the Republican Party and then to sharply divide the nation, Bernstein speculates that "as with Watergate, the investigation of George W. Bush and his presidency needs to start from a shared premise and set of principles that can be embraced by Democrats and Republicans, by liberals and centrists and conservatives, and by opponents of the war and its advocates: that the president of the United States and members of his administration must defend the requirements of the Constitution, obey the law, demonstrate common sense, and tell the truth." The Republican rubber-stamp Congress shares nothing with the Democrats or with the American people as strongly as the guilt they share with the Bush Regime for virtually all of their faults and failures. This is going to be a big problem in Bernstein's hopes to get this bipartisan investigation going before November.

In November the American people will either decide that they indeed do not want an attack on Iran-- unless, of course Bush has already, as is likely, done it-- or they will attempt to evade responsibility for what it brings. In November, the American people will decide whether they want the madness brought to a stop or if they want more years-- perhaps endless years-- or a rubber-stamp congress aiding and abetting policies that have shown themselves as utterly abhorrent to a growing majority of people in this country.

As Bernstein points out, "in a baker's dozen of hearings before pliant [he politely describes as "pliant" what I call "rubber-stamp'] committees of Congress, a parade of the top brass from Rice to Rumsfeld, to the Joint Chiefs, to Paul Bremer has managed for almost three years to evade responsibility for— or even acknowledgment of— the disintegrating situation on the ground in Iraq, its costs in lives and treasure, and its disastrous reverberations through the world, and for an assault on constitutional principles at home. Similarly, until the Senate Watergate hearings, Nixon and his men at the top had evaded responsibility for Watergate and their cover-up of all the 'White House horrors.' With the benefit of hindsight, it is now almost impossible to look at the president's handling of the war in Iraq in isolation from his handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Certainly any investigation of the president and his administration should include both disasters. Before 9/11, Bush and Condoleezza Rice had been warned in the starkest of terms— by their own aides, by the outgoing Clinton administration, and by experts on terrorism— of the urgent danger of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack in the United States. Yet the first top-level National Security Council meeting to discuss the subject was not held until September 4, 2001— just as the F.B.I. hierarchy had been warned by field agents that there were suspected Islamic radicals learning to fly 747s with no legitimate reasons for doing so, but the bureau ultimately ignored the urgency of problem, just as Bush had ample opportunity (despite what he said later) to review and competently execute a disaster plan for the hurricane heading toward New Orleans."

In what sounds like a very convincing case he is building towards a call to prematurely end the Bush era, Bernstein points out the 4 eternal and indelible "photographic images of the George W. Bush epoch: an airplane crashing into World Trade Tower number two; Bush in a Florida classroom reading from a book about a goat while a group of second-graders continued to captivate him for another seven minutes after Andrew Card had whispered to the president, "America is under attack"; floodwaters inundating New Orleans, and its residents clinging to rooftops for their lives; and, two days after the hurricane struck, Bush peeking out the window of Air Force One to inspect the devastation from a safe altitude. The aftermath of the hurricane's direct hit, both in terms of the devastation and the astonishing neglect and incompetence from the top down, would appear to be unique in American history. Except for the Civil War and the War of 1812 (when the British burned Washington), no president has ever lost an American city; and if New Orleans is not lost, it will only be because of the heroics of its people and their almost superhuman efforts to overcome the initial lethargy and apparent non-comprehension of the president. Bush's almost blank reaction was foretold vividly in a video of him and his aides meeting on August 28, 2005, the day before Katrina made landfall. The tape— withheld by the administration from Congress but obtained by the Associated Press along with seven days of transcripts of administration briefings— shows Bush and his Homeland Security chief being warned explicitly that the storm could cause levees to overflow, put large number of lives at risk, and overwhelm rescuers."

Is this tape, and these pictures enough for Congress to overcome it's partisanship and go forward with an investigation now. Woodward says yes. I think he's smoking something laced with something else. If gallows are in Bush's future those same gallows will see scores of congressmen as well; they're all in it together and this is something the American people need to rescue themselves from. Let's just pray Diebold isn't counting the votes.