Impeachy keen

IF THE BUSH administration were to make a guest appearance on a Saturday-morning cartoon, the only possible venue would be The Road Runner, in some variant of one of those scenes in which Wile E. Coyote finds himself standing on an absurdly overextended ledge or dashing along on thin air, the ground beneath his busy paws having given way to a deep canyon. Wile E.'s plunge is always delayed for comic effect, but it always comes.

Cartoons, of course, are not real life. For months, for years, the government of George W. Bush has sailed Wile E. Coyote-like through the political ether, wafting over messes of its own making: the blood-soaked sands of Iraq and the dungeons of Abu Ghraib, grand-jury chambers filled with testimony about Karl Rove's leakings of classified intelligence data, service stations selling $3-a-gallon gasoline, and now New Orleans, destroyed by storm, flood, and neglect as if in some biblical reprise. For months, for years, I – and I suspect many, many others – have waited for the inevitable plunge to reality and accountability. The ground long ago disappeared from beneath the wheels of George W.'s mountain bike, the canyon's maw could hardly be more gaping, and gravity is supposed to be an irresistible force. The only question was which act of incompetence or malice would precipitate the tumble. Yet the proverbial other shoe – the people's recognizing that they have been royally fucked by this crew of cheats, liars, thieves, fools, and bullies – has unaccountably failed to drop.

One's sense of disbelief that so much could so brazenly have been gotten away with for so long is sharpened by reading such books as Eliot Weinberger's succinct but astounding What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (New Directions, $13.95 paper), a literary New Yorker's assessment of the millennial fevers – of empire, paranoia, dread, delusion, and denial – that have haunted the American republic since the celebratory fireworks of 2000. It matters that Weinberger is a stylist of the first rank, for style carries most of the emotional charge of prose and therefore a good deal of its meaning, especially when the subject is an emotional one, as all great subjects are, including the descent of a once-great power into night and evil. It matters at least as much that he never stops reminding us of the sordidness of Bush's ascension to the presidency, by court appointment rather than election – of, simply, Bush's illegitimacy, papered over by trumped-up wars and fear-mongering and ignored by a duck-and-cover White House press corps but as real and terrifying today as it was in December 2000. How the country permitted itself to be hijacked by what Weinberger calls a "sleeper cell" of right-wing fanatics with a big-name dunce for a figurehead but no true political base in the population is a question historians will still be pondering and writing about 300 years from now.

Meanwhile, there is the matter of giving Bush II the sack. A fat chance came and went last year in the form of an election that was almost certainly rigged. (For a disturbing account of at least some of the Republicans' ballot-box shenanigans, see What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election [Academy Chicago, $10.95 paper].) That opportunity having been squandered or sabotaged, there remain on the table of possibilities: resignation (beyond imagining), an act of God (incalculable), and impeachment (wildly unlikely, and yet ...).

We can go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that a Republican Congress would never put a Republican president in the dock no matter how ruinous his regime. Republicans are, as a rule, less fractious and more obedient than Democrats. The plain goal of the modern Republican party, moreover, is not just rule but one-party rule: the destruction of any opposition, a thousand-year ... interval of obliterating dominance. That this fact has escaped the notice of Democrats and the media alike does not make it less real or less urgent. As a friend of mine noted recently of today's Republicans, "These are our fascists."

Trying to impose one-party rule is deplorable, yes, and deeply un-American, but it is not necessarily an impeachable offense. Nothing is an impeachable offense for a Republican president while Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives – but should the electorate awaken from its troubled slumber, should the public start noticing that Bush has scattered disaster and misery like Johnny Appleseed, should the public feel the urge to vent at the ballot box in 2006, Republicans may well find that rigging 435 congressional elections is trickier than rigging a presidential election, or is, in fact, impossible.

A Democratic House searching for grounds on which to impeach George W. Bush wouldn't have to do much searching. The constitutional standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors" is as lofty, stately, and vague as a cumulous cloud, but a simple and obvious, an earthy, truth is that Bush has breached the oath he swore as president, "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and, by extension, the country itself. The Iraq war was not launched to fulfill this duty but in total disregard of it; as his continual bleats to the contrary indicate, he has squandered America's blood and treasure not in the national interest but in a personal and petty one. If that is not a high crime, nothing is.