Oooh, nuance!

"Impeachment is not the cause of a Constitutional crisis - it's the remedy for a Constitutional crisis."

--John Nichols of The Nation magazine, Bill Moyers Journal (online at pbs.org)

I've always assumed that the Republics impeached Bill Clinton for the following reasons:

1) He was not a Republic.
2) He was not rich.
3) Chicks dug him. (I'm snarking a bit there, but not much.)

But I've been thinking a lot about the almost complete news blackout regarding the astonishing American support for impeachment of Bush and Cheney. The latest polls show 45% in favor of impeaching Bush, and 54% in favor of impeaching Cheney. In contrast, during Clinton's actual impeachment, the numbers in favor were much lower - averaging about 30% in favor. Why is the national news media only now starting to mention the "i" word - and most in a dismissive way?

Bear with me now, for here is where I fly off into the land of paranoia...What if longtime Republic operatives like Rove, Cheney, Norquist and Rumsfeld were planning all along to install someone like Bush in the presidency - someone who believes wholeheartedly that the executive branch should be supreme over all? What if they've been working for a long, long time to get party loyalists in Congress who would agree to weaken the legislative branch almost beyond repair, to further empower the Presidency? And what if they planned to nominate unitary executive believers to the Supreme Court who were likely to uphold any court challenges to the President's power?

And what if, to set all this up, they planned to impeach a sitting Democratic president on weak Constitutional grounds, just to set up a distaste for the impeachment process in the mainstream media?

If this was indeed their plan, it's working rather well.