I'm exhausted from two weeks of covering the Libby trial. I sit the WiFi-friendly media room, watching and listening to a feed of the courtroom proceedings (while keeping up with email). And after seven or so hours of details-drenched testimony, I quickly have to make sense of it all, create as much of an overarching narrative as possible, and post a lengthy piece before heading home. Today, I'm reading a week's worth of newspapers and other materials--catching up. Did you see Wolf Blitzer's interview with Dick Cheney? It demonstrated that Cheney doesn't just spend time in an undisclosed location; he lives on another planet. Look at this exchange:

Blitzer: But there is a terrible situation [in Iraq].

Cheney: No, there is not. There is not. There's problems, ongoing problems.

Cheney's one-line trumps anything Bush said in his State of the Union address as an indicator of the state of the White House. Thousands of Iraqi civilians are being killed on a monthly basis; scores of American GIs are being killed each month. How is that not "terrible?" Next to Cheney, Bush look like he's attached to reality.

And let me point out something else you should read--if you haven't already. Regular visitors know that I am down on impeachment. If this is news to you--or you need a refresher--check out my most recent anti-impeachment column here. Well, there's someone who can argue the con case better than me: Sanford Levinson, a scholar and law professor at University of Texas. In this week's Nation magazine, he debates former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, an impeachment champion, and presents strong points. Levinson writes:

Only because of the Constitution are serious progressives engaging in an entirely fruitless campaign to impeach Bush by describing him as a criminal. It is fruitless for two quite different reasons. The first, and more practical, is that there is simply no possibility that Bush will actually be removed from office in the twenty-four months that unfortunately remain to him. One might well contemplate impeachment if there were a possibility of its being successful. But the House Democratic leadership has rejected the idea, not least because there is no possibility that the constitutionally required two-thirds of a nearly evenly divided Senate would vote to convict an impeached George W. Bush. Thus, advocates of impeachment are in effect supporting a strategy doomed not only to fail but also to be perceived by most of the country as a dangerous distraction from the pressing problems facing the country....

But there is a second reason to be wary of the impeachment conversation: It inevitably becomes a highly legalistic one about exactly what constitutes "high crimes and misdemeanors." It is not enough that the President be a criminal; he must be a criminal of a certain gravity. If there is anything the country needs less at this point than a self-defeating political strategy, it is the further domination of public debate by lawyers trading jargon-ridden charges and countercharges about the criminal liability of the President. Almost no one was genuinely edified by the legal debate that occurred in 1998. Most of the public believed that most of the lawyers--or at least those on "the other side"--who participated in that debate were motivated by partisan political considerations. The same would be true today.

Read the full piece here. Levinson recently published a book on the Constitution's failings called Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It).

Posted by David Corn at January 26, 2007 11:28 AM