Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

In approximately 5 hours I’ll be appearing on Fox News’s The Big Story with John Gibson to “debate” Bob Beckel (Democratic “strategist” and the Walter Mondale’s campaign manager in 1984, the man who famously appropriated the Wendy’s slogan, “Where’s the Beef”) on the topic of impeachment.

I am for it, Beckel is against it.

In the interest of clarifying the arguments for impeachment, I’d like to encourage a discussion here about the NSA warrantless wiretappings and the NIE leaks, focusing on three themes:

1. The failure of Democrats to adequately respond to this flagrant abuse of Executive powers — read: breaking the motherfucking LAW — and how this failure is merely an extension of the failed policies and strategies of Democrats over the past 20 years, Clinton notwithstanding.

2. What did the President know, when did he know it, is he above the law and if not, why not?

3. Finally, partisanship: We need it. This Republic was founded on the idea of conflicting philosophies and ideals being forced by design to come to compromise. Ideally, we should be living in a constant state of push and pull between opposing ideologies, and affecting compromise and rapprochement through our system of checks and balances, as well as our system of representation.

In my view, there can be no embodiment of Franklin and Jefferson’s Republic of Compromise without a constant, sustained level of opposition. Let’s face it, we suppose we’d all LOVE it if nobody ever felt differently than we do, but such is not the case. And our system is increasingly crippled by the fact that it has a strong right wing… and no left wing. The Democrats have ceded ALL the left territory and now live in the centre… but when you live in the centre of a political system based on compromise, you are forced by default to compromise rightward.

By abandoning the liberal, leftist principles and values of its roots, the Democratic Party has become an enabler of the right wing — of the Republicans. It is no longer an opposition party.

What do Democrats stand for? And why aren’t they standing?

I stand for impeachment. And I find it insulting to the American people that strategists in the Democratic party continue to debate the issue framed around focus groups and polls, rather than the principles at hand: The President of the United States has broken the law, he has lied to the American people repeatedly and he arrogantly and defiantly claims the right to do so based on specious interpretations of the War Powers Act of 1973.

If investigations are allowed by the Republican congressional majority to proceed, I believe it will be determined that George W. Bush was a co-conspirator in the act of publicly exposing a covert CIA operative — an act that, in the words of his own father, President George H. W. Bush, is “TREASON.”

Should it be proven that George W. Bush intended or even knew about the Libby Leak regarding Valerie Plame, censure is no longer an option.

George W. Bush must be impeached.