Given that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ ongoing trouble with the truth made headlines again this week, and his record for dishonesty can now be summarized into an impressive list, the NYT’s Adam Cohen broaches a subject first raised by the Times’ editorial board last month: impeaching the Attorney General.

Impeachment of Mr. Gonzales would fit comfortably into the founders’ framework. No one could charge this Congress with believing that executive branch members serve at the “pleasure of the Senate” or the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that impeachment of President Bush is “off the table,” and there has been little talk of impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney or others in the administration.

Congress has heard extensive testimony about how Mr. Gonzales’s Justice Department has become an arm of a political party, choosing lawyers for nonpartisan positions based on politics, and bringing cases — including prosecutions that have put people in jail — to help Republicans win elections.

Mr. Gonzales’s repeated false and misleading statements to Congress are also impeachable conduct. James Iredell, whom George Washington would later appoint to the Supreme Court, told North Carolina’s ratification convention that “giving false information to the Senate” was the sort of act “of great injury to the community” that warranted impeachment.

The United States attorneys scandal is also the sort of abuse the founders worried about. Top prosecutors, most with sterling records, were apparently fired because they refused to let partisan politics guide their decisions about whether to prosecute. Madison, the father of the Constitution, noted in a speech to the first Congress that “wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject” an official to impeachment.

By the way, for those keeping score at home, Rep. Jay Inslee’s (D-Wash.) House resolution on Gonzales’ impeachment has an underwhelming 27 co-sponsors.

Cohen’s piece makes a compelling case that the remedy is legitimate in Gonzales’ case, but if there’s little political will for impeaching the AG, it’s largely an academic exercise.

In the Dem debate in Iowa this morning, Hillary stuck by her foreign policy criticism of Obama, Edwards vowed to eliminate nukes from the planet, and Obama revealed that he prepared for the debate by riding bumper cars at a local state fair. Those and other items in our Election Central Debate Roundup.

Karl Rove, this morning:

“What I did say to one reporter was, I’ve heard that, too. And what I said to another reporter, off the record, was, in essence, I don’t think you ought to be writing about this.”

Matt Cooper, shortly thereafter:

“I think [Rove] was dissembling to put it charitably. To imply that he didn’t know about [Plame’s identity], or that he heard it in some rumor out in the hallways, is nonsense.”

Rove? Dissemble? About leaking the identity of an undercover CIA agent? You don’t say.

Anyone who’s seen Fox News knows its on-air personalities offer Republicans in-kind contributions with practically every broadcast. Once in a while, though, they drop the pretense and make the support more direct.

It’s no secret that Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News commentator, has helped to raise Rudy Giuliani’s profile – but now he’s helped the former mayor raise money, too.

In a little noticed event this month, Hannity — co-host of Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” and host of a popular WABC radio show — introduced the Republican front-runner at a closed-door, $250-per-head fund-raiser Aug. 9 in Cincinnati, campaign officials acknowledge.

In so doing, some believe that Hannity — while clearly a commentator paid to express his opinions — crossed the line from punditry into financial rainmaking for a presidential candidate whose bottom line is now better for it.

Atrios’ joke about calling a bloggers’ ethics panel comes to mind….

I can appreciate the fact that Fox News exists to blur the line between reporting and advocacy, but this seems over the top, even by the network’s standards. Indeed, when Dan Rather’s daughter organized and hosted a Democratic Party fundraiser in Texas in 2001, and the then-CBS anchor made an appearance, Bill O’Reilly blasted the ethical impropriety.

“Now Rather gave a speech at a fundraiser, so money changed hands,” O’Reilly said on the air. “I mean, I wouldn’t do that.”

It’s been a discouraging weekend for the Lieberman-Kristol-McCain contingent. Yesterday, Jonathan Finer explained that their visits to Baghdad — after which they boast of widespread “progress” — are scripted, largely “ceremonial” visits. Their “epiphanies” aren’t based on much, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Today, champions of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy suffered another indignity with a powerful NYT op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division, who will soon be returning home frustrated and jaded.

Joe Klein said the troops’ piece “puts to shame — and shame is the appropriate word — all the Kristol, McCain, Lieberman, Pollack and O’Hanlon etc etc cheerleading of the past two months.” I think that’s exactly right. From the op-ed:

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. […]

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side. […]

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Read the whole thing, but keep a couple of things in mind. First, these seven members of the 82nd Airborne are showing courage on the battlefield, but they’re also showing political courage in writing this piece while serving on active duty. This isn’t an op-ed that is going to be well received at the White House, so kudos to all of them.

Second, like John Cole, I can’t help but wonder how the right will respond to something like this. I suppose there will be a temptation to kick the Smear Machine into high gear, but it’s probably more likely that conservatives will simply pretend the op-ed doesn’t exist. It would be far easier than challenging the piece’s conclusions.

Following up on an item from last night, the NYT reported that Congress, by changing the meaning of “electronic surveillance” under FISA, inadvertently gave the Bush administration more powers that lawmakers even realized.

But just as striking as the sloppy lawmaking was the administration’s response.

…Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.

At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”

That’s the important thing to remember: the White House considers the legislation “just advisory,” so it doesn’t much matter whether or not lawmakers gave up too much authority to the president. He’s going to do what he wants to do.

Depending on what part of the country you live in, the latest in a series of debates for Democratic presidential candidates is about to get underway in Iowa. ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos will moderate the event, which will be the eighth Democratic debate of the campaign thus far.

And if Barack Obama’s campaign has anything to do with it, there won’t be too many more.

Tired of trudging from one debate to the next, Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign is saying “Enough.” A Web posting Saturday by his campaign manager said that the schedule of unceasing debates and forums in the Democratic presidential campaign was proving a distraction.

Obama will decline new debate invitations until mid-December, the posting said, and after that, he will consider requests case by case. […]

“We simply cannot continue to hopscotch from forum to forum and run a campaign true to the bottom-up movement for change that propelled Barack into this race,” campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in the posting on the campaign website’s blog.

Like Matt Yglesias, I feel a certain selfishness in applauding Obama’s decision. I watch all of these debates, in the hopes of catching something newsworthy, and routinely end up disappointed. Not only is the same ground is covered over and over again, but with eight candidates, even thoughtful answers are cut short by time constraints. I end up watching the events a bit like some NASCAR fans watch car races — waiting for a stunning victory or a spectacular crash. In reality, both are pretty rare.

As far as I can tell, Obama’s campaign isn’t exactly shutting down the debate calendar. There have been seven debates and 19 candidate forums thus far. Based on the statement from the campaign yesterday, Obama will have participated in 15 debates by mid-December, so it’s not as if voters won’t have a chance to measure his, or any other candidate’s, debating skills.

Any chance other candidates will follow Obama’s lead on this?

From TPM Reader DC …

Re ‘You’re going to look super in a burka’: I think this makes sense mainly if you consider that unilateralism is in many ways the flip side of isolationism. To an awful lot of people in places like, say, West Texas [I once lived there], the outside world is seen as a vague, threatening place, full of people who want what we’ve got. First it was the Nazis, then the Communists, and now the Islamists; they all blur into a single, malignant Other, who need to be stopped well short of our shores [Throw in the Trilateral Commission and the international bankers for good measure]. I recall teaching history in WTX and having to explain to a student that Nazis and Communists weren’t the same people; he actually thought they were, and he was a smart guy! And Bush, despite his gestures of tolerance toward the American Islamic community, plays to this sentiment, with his “They hate our freedom” line and the threat that if we leave Iraq “They’ll follow us home.” To a lot of people, that doesn’t mean acts of terror; that means *conquest.* It’s perfectly understandable, actually; people typically interpret new problems in terms of what they’ve long understood already, and in terms set by the larger understandings of their communities. And this is a huge, diverse country–a fact persistently obscured by the sameness with which we experience it from the air or on the interstate. But precisely because this sort of reflexive defensive posture makes sense in a certain epistemological universe, it’s extremely difficult to deal with if you’re from a different one.

When Congress “revised” FISA a few weeks ago, lawmakers gave the White House the unchecked surveillance power Bush wanted — and then some.

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches of American citizens and the collection of their business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said. […]

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. Two weeks after the legislation was signed into law, there is still heated debate over how much power Congress gave to the president.

“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.

Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.

These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.

National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is dismayed by the criticism of the war in Iraq from congressional Democrats. (via Steve M.)

[I]t is hard to recall of any war in our history — the Vietnam hysteria aside — that a sitting Senate majority leader declared it lost in the middle of hostilities. We have not previously witnessed senior opposition senators alleging that their own American servicemen were analogous to Nazis, Stalinists, Cambodian mass murders, Saddam’s Baathist killers, or engaging in habitual terrorizing and killing of innocent civilians.

Now, I suspect Hanson is taking a few liberties when he suggests senior Senate Dems have said U.S. troops are comparable to Nazis, but Hanson may be surprised to go back and look at what senior congressional Republicans were saying as recently as 1999 when then-President Clinton sent American servicemen into Kosovo.

William Saletan noted one specific weekend in May 1999.

Every time the United States goes into battle, anti-war activists blame the causes and casualties of the conflict on the U.S. government. They excuse the enemy regime’s aggression and insist that it can be trusted to negotiate and honor a fair resolution. While doing everything they can to hamstring the American administration’s ability to wage the war, they argue that the war can never be won, that the administration’s claims to the contrary are lies, and that the United States should trim its absurd demands and bug out with whatever face-saving deal it can get. In past wars, Republicans accused these domestic opponents of sabotaging American morale and aiding the enemy. But in this war, Republicans aren’t bashing the anti-war movement. They’re leading it.

Specifically, Saletan highlighted comments from then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, then-Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, who, over the course of a few days, said Milosevic’s atrocities are America’s fault; the failure of diplomacy to avert the war is America’s fault; Congress should oppose the war while troops are in harm’s way; Congress should micromanage war policy instead of the Commander in Chief; and the mission is doomed to failure. If memory serves, Dems didn’t question their patriotism, label them “traitors,” accuse them of undermining the military, or condemn them for aiding and abetting the enemy.

I have a hunch Hanson’s forgotten about the whole period of time. Come to think of it, current congressional Republicans probably have, too.