So, let's see: Bush is losing old-money Republican conservatives, GOP senators, neo-con theorists outside the Cheney-Rumsfeld nexus, military insiders, troops under fire in Iraq -- who else can he lose? Would you believe the lunatic fringe, as symbolized by that raving Limbaugh wannabee Bill O'Reilly? ( http://mediamatters.org/items/200602220007 ) The Fox News pundit, who usually is in lockstep with the Bush program and calls anybody who criticizes those policies idiots and worse, had this to say the other day about the need to get out of Iraq ASAP:
"[We need to] hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible [because] there are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them."
GOP DISCONTENT ON NATIONAL SECURITY
Many Representatives and Senators also deeply resent the way the Congress has been frozen out of the power loop ( www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801607.html ) by the Bush Administration. "We simply want to participate and aren't going to be PR flacks when they need us," Florida's conservative GOP Congressman Mark Foley said. "We all have roles. We have oversight. When you can't answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions -- we can't simply do it on trust."
Scott Reed, who managed Robert Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, called the current low poll ratings for Bush and the GOP "pretty shattering," noting especially that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent. "The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women [voters] and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."
THE PRESIDENT AS DICTATOR
"Even if you're a Republican member of Congress, you don't buy the exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part of the Constitution that matters is Article II," on presidential power, said James B. Steinberg, a dean at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you want them to be in on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff."
For example, two staunch conservative Southern Senators ( www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060313/13glo.htm ) won't accept Bush's Unified Executive theory of governance. "I think the administration has looked at the legitimate power of the executive during a time of war and taken it to extremes," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "[It's] to the point that we'd lose constitutional balance. Under their theory, there would be almost no role for the Congress or the courts." Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott was even more blunt: "Don't put your fist in my face."
EVEN WALL ST. IS TALKING IMPEACHMENT
All those defections from the Bush orbit are doing great damage to the once-unified Bush&Co. juggernaut, but I've left out one key one: Wall Street. The titans of finance are agitated, to the point of raising the awareness of the possibility of impeachment or even urging serious consideration of Bush's removal.
The Wall Street Journal, ( www.democrats.com/wsj-impeachpac ) alone among mainstream daily newspapers, has deigned to mention that there is a growing impeachment movement and an active PAC (impeachpac.org). And here's some of what Barron's Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan wrote in that establishment financial journal: ( www.buzzflash.com/analysis/05/12/ana05059.html )
>>...The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him...Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.
>>Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation...
>>It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law. ...
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