Everyone who follows national politics knows by now that Nancy Pelosi and others in the House have pledged not to put impeachment of Bush on the table, much to the dismay of those of us who believe that he is not only utterly incompetent but deceptive to boot. Of course, I have to admit that the idea that Dick "Shoot Em in the Face" Cheney would take over is daunting but heck, he's running things anyway, Bush is only the Goober-In-Charge. Lewis Lapham has an article in his "Notebook" where he talks about the necessity of impeachment. A few paragraphs that stood out.

Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over of as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or a subpoena. We can't "lay out a new agenda for America" unless we know which America we're talking about, the one that embodies the freedoms of a sovereign people or the one made to fit the requirements of a totalitarian state. We owe it to ourselves to know the difference. Seldom in our history have we been offered a better chance to learn a more useful civics lesson, and by holding up to the light the malfeasance, nonfeasance, and "all the other rot" embedded in the character and conduct of the Bush administration, we might discover what we mean by America the beautiful. Like it or not, and no matter how unpleasant or impolitic the proceedings, the spirit of the law doesn't allow the luxury of fastidious silence or discreet abstention.

...The Constitution doesn't serve at the pleasure of Representative Pelosi any more than it answers to the whim of President Bush, and by taking "off the table" the mess of an impeachment proceeding, the lady from California joins the president in his distaste for such an unclean thing as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Rightly understood, democracy is an uproar, the argument meant to be blunt, vigilant, and fierce, not, as the purveyors of our respectable opinion would have it, a matter of liveried civil servants passing one another polite synonyms on silver trays......

The question now before the country is the one confronted by the man afraid of finding out that he's been robbed. How much longer do we wish to pretend that nothing really happened, or that nothing really valuable is lost; that the crime is the losing of the Iraq War, not the making of it? .... by impeaching President Bush the Congress can not only impart that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge without which a free people can't know whether the adjective is 1 or 0; it might also turn over enough dirt to unearth the American democracy buried at the feet of Uncle Sam