The Impeachment-Mongering Begins

Here the Democrats go already, on both sides of the Capitol.

First, Senate Donks are ramping up their fishing expedition in one of their favorite "lakes," the Bush Administration's methods of gathering intelligence from captured jihadis:

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, D-VT, who will chair the Senate Judiciary Committee starting in January has asked the Justice Department to release two newly acknowledged documents, which set U.S. policy on how terrorism suspects are detained and interrogated. The existence of the documents has been confirmed by the CIA.

The first document sought is a directive President Bush signed giving the CIA authority to establish detention facilities outside the United States....

I.e. "rendition," a policy also employed by the Clinton administration with no self-righteous objections from "Leaky" and friends.

....It also outlines interrogation methods that may be used against detainees. The second is a 2002 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA’s general counsel regarding interrogation methods that the CIA was empowered to employ against detained al-Qaida leaders.

"The American people deserve to have detailed and accurate information about the role of the Bush Administration in developing the interrogation policies and practices that have engendered such deep criticism and concern at home and around the world,” Leahy wrote Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, demanding that Gonzales produce any revisions and analyses of those and other memos. In addition he demanded any CIA documents that interpret the scope of interrogation practices permitted and prohibited by the Detainee Treatment Act or the Military Commissions Act. [emphasis added]

Translation: Protecting the lives of American civilians matters less than appeasing the anti-American sensibilities of "world opinion." And just in case the Bushies are going beyond the bounds of the DTA or MCA, which Leaky and friends are going to repeal in any case, he's going to cut off those avenues of attack as well.

By any means necessary:

"I expect real answers, or we’ll have testimony under oath until we get them,” Senator Leahy told the New York Times. "We’re entitled to know these answers, and in many instances we don’t get them because people are hiding their mistakes. And that’s no excuse.”

His aides have cited more than sixty-five requests he has made to the Justice Department or other agencies in recent years that have been rejected or permitted to languish without reply.

Leahy expressed hope for greater cooperation from the Bush Administration, which he described to the Times as having been "obsessively secretive.”

The Bushies have been "obsessively secretive" because they know that intelligence-gathering is of paramount importance in countering terrorist plots and the "obsessive secrecy" is critical to that intelligence-gathering. "We" are NOT entitled to know these answers because if we learn them, the enemy will learn them and stopping their attacks will become that much more difficult. Which is why the White House has repeatedly told Leaky to go pound sand.

The Democrats know this, of course. And while they certainly do seek to take the baton from their friends at the New York Times and pave the way for more massive al Qaeda and/or Iranian attacks against the homeland, the primary objective of Leaky's fishing expedition is to force a partisan confrontation with the Bush Administration so as to lay the foundation for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Because to Leaky and friends, they, and not Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are the true enemy.

Meanwhile, over on the House side, Representative Henry "Nostrildamus" Waxman, incoming Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, believes he has so many avenues of investigation that he doesn't know where to start:

The lawmaker poised to cause the Bush Administration's biggest headaches when Democrats take control of Congress may just be a grocer's son from Watts who's hardly a household name off Capitol Hill.

Representative Henry Waxman has spent the last six years waging a guerrilla campaign against the White House and its corporate allies, launching searing investigations into everything from military contracts to Medicare prices from his perch on the Government Reform Committee.

In January, Waxman becomes committee chairman - and thus the lead congressional hound of an Administration many Democrats feel has blundered badly as it expanded the power of the executive branch.

Waxman's biggest challenge as he mulls what to probe?

"The most difficult thing will be to pick and choose," he said.

The choices he makes could help define Bush's legacy.

"There is just no question that life is going to be different for the Administration," said Representative Tom Davis, R-VA, the current committee chairman. "Henry is going to be tough. . . . And he's been waiting a long time to be able to do this."

The whole Democrat party has been waiting a long time to exact its harrowing revenge. And no amount of "New Tone" nonsense or "reaching out" is going to blunt it, either.

The rest of the ASSociated Press piece fellates Waxman unbearably, but it includes this not-very-veiled Waxman warning to the defeated GOP:

He wants to do it all with the help of Republicans.

"We want to return to civility and bipartisanship," Waxman said. "Legislation ought to be based on evidence, not ideology."

Legislative Stockholm Syndrome. And there'll be a lot of cowed Pachyderms who'll go along, too, with both Waxman and Leahy.

If you think the Republicans lost the mid-term elections because they let themselves get "RINOized" in the majority, just wait till you see how bad they get now that they're back in the political wilderness. They'll slip into their meek, servile minority persona without missing a beat. And the groundwork for further losses in 2008 - to say nothing of major reverses in the war against Islamic Fundamentalism - will be irretrievably laid.

If it ever gets better, it'll get a lot worse first.