Like many who have posted here, I think there was evidence sufficient to impeach Cheney and Bush once it was clear they had led us to war by lying to us. And, in the job of AG, Fredo has clearly been a dissembler for some time now, not to mention the spurious legal arguments he made on Bush's behalf when he was still Bush's lawyer (e.g., justifications for torture and setting aside large portions of the Geneva Conventions). So it's easy to be more than a little impatient with Congress's rate of action on holding these lowlifes accountable. I've sworn and seethed with rage at what they are doing to our nation too, and I do not relish the enormous amount of work it will take to restore our country (however imperfect it may have been) once we are finally rid of them.

On the other hand, for those of us who remember Nixon and how he was eventually brought down, there might be some important lessons/parallels. The threat of impeachment that finally forced Nixon from office seemed an awful long time coming too. The time from the Watergate break-in (June 17, 1972) until his exit August 9, 1972 was over two years, and there were other clear deceptions that could have been considered high crimes and misdemeanors before the Watergrate break-in: revelations about COINTELPRO (1971), illegal invasion of Cambodia (1969), etc. A lot of us common folk felt there was ample evidence to kick him out of office before he was forced to resign.

The wheels of justice ground slowly then too, but the one thing one could say when he finally left, is that except for die hards, no one doubted there was sufficient evidence to send him packing. Nixon was secretive, like Bush-Cheney, and Cheney is no doubt behind the current stonewalling and has taken the lessons from the Nixon administration and used them to make it even harder to get at the truth than Nixon did.

Nonetheless, it does appear things may finally be unraveling for the Bush administration. And I know the Dems have been awfully damned timid with this administration, so there are no guarantees they'll follow through the way the Congress did with Nixon. Still let's do all we can to hold their feet to the fire for all our sakes. Better to go down fighting than to give into despair. The bastards always win when we do nothing.

Let's get real here pets are not humans and many state operated humane organizations destroy thousands annually w/o any public debate or media frenzy...

Whoa. Get a grip. There is a world of moral difference between brutally electrocuting a dog to death for losing a fight and the truly unfortunate need to euthanize dogs and cats due to significant overpopulation. Are you really saying that you can't tell the difference, or do you just like to make inflammatory statements to rile folks up?

Also, I have a suspicion, most, if not all, Salon readers realize there is a difference between pets and humans and do not draw simple moral equivalences. But that is a strawman argument here anyway, since one can be appalled by wanon cruelty to dogs and to humans. They are not mutally exclusive categories.

Oh, and if the officiating in the NBA were as thoroughly corrupt as suggested here, do you really think that small-market, boring (well, for some at least) San Antonio would keep making it to the finals (and winning)? Seriously, if Donaghy really is just a single, rogue ref, and he is dealt with appropriately--as seems to be the case so far--I think the NBA won't be any worse off than before. Which is not to say it doesn't have other issues.

This is pathetic. It's like listening to my kids when they were younger and were caught in an evident lie and then making it worse by trying to parse their way out of it. I used to tell them they needed to stop acting like a lawyer, that it wasn't going to do them any good since they knew what they'd done and lying would only make it worse. Leahy and the Congress basically need to do the same thing to Gonzales. Enough is enough. This bad boy needs some real consequences for his behavior.

Let fury have the hour/Anger can be power/You know that you can use it.

If Edwards is channeling and doing this, all the more power to him. Too many Democrats have been wimps for too long.

Throughout the first 6 years or so of the current administration, the scales kept falling progressively from my eyes. With each revelation of their duplicitousness and outright lies, I kept thinking they had made me so jaded that I could no longer be surprised by anything they might do. But time and again, they'd top themselves and I'd find myself newly shocked and upset with how they were undermining even the most basic notions of honesty required in governance.

No more. I read this post, and I feel nothing. Just a shrug of the shoulders and a dimissive thought, "Yes, this is to be expected."

And apparently such thinking is commonplace now among so called sober thinkers. Last week, Dan Froomkin reported that Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University spoke seriously about the possibility that Cheney could be planning to attack Iran as a means of tilting public opinion in favor of a Republican presidential candidate. This is the sort of analysis that only fringe conspiracy theorists would put forward pre-Bush 43. It speaks volumes that the level of trust has fallen to the point that serious people who live and breathe policy in an academic setting don't dismiss such scenarios.