The clock is ticking. Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney? (Tick-tock, tick-tock.)

"That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to [NYT reporter Judith] Miller [Valerie] Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

"This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter."

-- investigative reporter Murray Waas,
in a report this week on Crooks and LIars

by Ken

At least the lords of Ruddigore, under the term of their Witch's Curse, only had to do one crime a day, once every day, forever. (Okay, to be technical, the terms of the curse were "one crime or more," but a mere onespot would get the job done.) Whereas the Bush regimista have spent night onto eight years now committing every war crime they could wrap their heads around and shredding the Constitution.

I would include "shredding the economy," but again, to be technical, this was done under the terms of "Republican governance," much of which is not -- astonishingly enough -- strictly speaking illegal. Of course that still leaves a goodly amount of plundering and profiteering that clearly falls on the far side of the law, and should certainly be available for inclusion on anyone's master list of "high crimes and misdemeanors" -- the constitutional specification for impeachment, of course.

Is there anything we can do here?

It's not a matter of retribution or "getting even." There's an important principle at stake. Because while the judgment of history on these people is likely to be fierce, that really isn't enough. The principle is that when you allow crimes to go unpunished, that tends not only to legitimize the behavior but to encourage the criminals and the people who follow them to do even worse stuff.

I'm not smart enough to know in what form the perpetrators of the Bush regime's crimes can still be held to account. In retrospect it becomes ever clearer that both Chimpy the Prez and his master, "Big Dick" Cheney, should have been impeached. Now we know that hindsight is 20/20, but this isn't just retrospective wisdom. Since it became clear the kind of extremist, law-be-damned regime this was going to be, there have been plenty of people shouting for impeachment, both before and after then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously declared it "off the table."

But hold on before jumping all over Speaker Pelosi. I am not at all saying that her political calculation was necessarily wrong. The fact is that a movement for impeachment against the president and vice president (and it would have crucial to do both, ideally in the same time frame, not only as a matter of basic criminal justice, but as an assurance that in the admittedly unlikely event that the president was actually removed from office, that office wouldn't simply have been turned over to that spawn of Satan . . . I mean to the vice president) wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

Even in the regime's second term, as it began falling apart, and then starting in 2007 with the Democrats in nominal control of both houses of Congress, there would have been no support from Republicans (and remember that what drove Richard Nixon out of office was growing Republican support for impeachment and almost surely, if he had allowed it to come to that, for conviction) and probably not all that much support from congressional Democrats, among whom impeachment was considered risky, dirty-fucking-hippie-type behavior.

Some observers said, "So what? It's important to get some kind of official condemnation of the regime's high crimes and misdemeanors on the record. And perhaps so. But consider, might it not have been worse to have an impeachment movement flicked off, for permanent dismissal as a partisan witchhunt? In other words, a larger version of the charge routinely hurled at the hardy band of Democratic House and Senate committee chairmen who actually tried to investigate even a tiny bit of the regime's rampant lawlessness after the congressional takeover?

Which hasn't entirely prevented additional investigations and revelations from materializing. And in just the last couple of weeks we've had Big Dick's almost certainly legally self-incriminating statements about his role in making possible the regime's use of waterboarding, which got Rachel Maddow all excited, and which Sen. Carl Levin for one agreed needed to be investigated to get the information on the record.

And just a few days ago crackerjack reporter Murray Waas dropped the bombshell on Crooks and Liars from which I've quoted above. Drawing on "a still-highly confidential FBI report," Waas reports that Big Dick admitted to federal investigators "that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light," acknowledging "that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer."

I don't know what to do about this, but I have a pretty good idea of the consequences of doing nothing. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

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