Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against both Bush and Cheney. This will obviously not result in their removal from office -- the "Republican Guard" in the Senate would never vote for conviction.

But this double impeachment would provide a highly publicized forum to spell-out once and for all the entire litany of "high crimes and misdemeanors" committed by this cabal -- with subpoenas and witnesses under oath.

Impeachment would only require a single-vote majority in the House, and as we've seen with the unending Republican obstructionism in the Senate, the Senate really has nothing better to do.

It's because they've got nothing.

Their ideology has failed. Their leaders have failed. Now they've painted themselves into an indefensible rhetorical corner where only the semi-functional lunatics known as the Republican "base" understand the code words which must be used in polite society.

I wouldn't look to the current Supreme Court for any relief on the "standing" issue. As we recently saw in their recent 5-4 ruling on "standing" in the lawsuit against government funding of religious activities, the Roberts court seems to have a firm Federalist Society commitment to protecting Bush administration interests.

Woudn't a more productive avenue be in "discovery"?

Forcing the government to produce a list of American citizens who have been illegally wiretapped (admittedly, a task of dubious possibility considering the remaining tenure of the Bush regime) could provide definitive "standing."

What seems to be missing from the reporting of the Iraq occupation is a realistic assessment of the chaos we've unleashed. It's not Al Qaeda we're fighting, or Sunnis or Shiites -- it's a vast assortment of disconnected armed groups.

If Iraq was in a state of "civil war" in the conventional sense, there would be just two groups to deal with, making negotiations or military confrontation much easier.

We will have to see significant improvement before we can characterize Iraq as in a state of "civil war." As it is now, it's just violent chaos.

Maybe the Iranians will do a better job of it.

When reality finally sinks in and US forces are withdrawn from Iraq -- with the inevitable result of Iranian hegemony -- we can expect the following lie to pervade our political discourse for a generation:

George W. Bush stood firm in Iraq, but victory was denied when he was "stabbed in the back" by Democrats and terror-appeasers.

Remember, we aren't dealing with the reality-based community.

It's gotten waaaayy past the point where these bozos could simply be stupid, or such sycophantic courtiers so eager for access that they'd write (or say) such shamelessly idiotic drivel.

These "presstitutes" are either getting envelopes stuffed with cash (checks could be problematic) delivered after every "Don't look at the man behind the curtain!" bit of flackery-posing-as-journalism appears in print or hits the airwaves -- or being blackmailed (illegal wiretaps could provide very good grist for extortion).

Payoffs or blackmail -- there are no other explanations. They literally couldn't be so stupid to believe the spin they are passing off as journalism.

I may very well be "deluded," but give me a better explanation for major media figures who proclaim it's better we be "kept in the dark," and do their best to do so -- at the obviously (by now) horrendous cost to our country.

McCain tried to position himself as the "toughest of the tough guys" by calling for more troops for Iraq. Imagine his shock when Dubya actually did it (against all military and diplomatic advice). Now McCain is stuck defending an indefensible policy.

This doesn't play well in the "reality-based community."

As for the Republican base, McCain will be forever suspect for McCain-Feingold, the recent immigration bill and his 2000 campaign's independence from the TV preachers.

McCain is dead meat, despite a solid conservative voting record -- another victim of the right-wing talk radio manufactured-outrage machine.

It would be extremely difficult to cite a single instance of a statement by Bush or his surrogates that was unambiguously true -- from the point of Bush's first campaign for the presidency to the present.

Bush's presidency was built on lies. Now the lies are becoming unraveled and revealed (with very little thanks to the corporate media). As has been exposed by former Bush insider John DiIulio, there is no policy apparatus in the Bush White House, only political calculation -- which, in this regime, is devoted to creating and disseminating more lies.

This is why the Bush regime has been so disastrously inept, with one policy debacle after the other. It also explains why Bush and his surrogates have been reduced to such incoherent defenses of their "policies," often reduced to claims of amnesia. It also explains the urgent need for secrecy in the Bush regime.

When con-men's lies are exposed, they usually have the common sense to disappear. These liars don't have that luxury. Instead, they will shamelessly offer-up even more fantastic and incoherent lies to justify their earlier cons.

"Absolute Immunity" is why White House Counsel John Dean never testified before the Watergate Select Committee, the tapes were never subpoenaed, Richard Nixon was never impeached, and the Watergate burglars were pardoned for simply "being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

As the most honored of former presidents, Nixon established the legal principle of "If the president does it, it's not illegal."

("Remember, we're an empire now -- we make our own reality." -- unnamed Bush administration official)

The most egregious aspect of the Wilson/Plame affair was how casually the Bush (Cheney?) regime burned a valuable covert intelligence asset pursuing perhaps the most crucial national-security concern of all; nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

Congressional Republicans have succeeded so far in hiding the extent of the damage to US intelligence from this intentional act of petty political retribution. When will the Democrats make this damage assessment public? It's long overdue.

This is a much graver issue than just the malicious termination of Valerie Plame's career.