As regular readers of this site know, I’ve always been against the movement to impeach President Bush. I take this position not because he hasn’t done plenty to merit it. My reasons are practical. Minor reasons are that it’s late in the president’s term and that I think impeachment itself is toxic to our political system — though it can be less toxic than the high officials thrown from office. My key reason, though, is that Congress at present can’t even get to the relatively low threshold of votes required to force the president’s hand on Iraq. So to use an analogy which for whatever reason springs readily to my mind at this point in my life, coming out for impeachment under present circumstances is like being so frustrated that you can’t crawl that you come out for walking. In various ways it seems to elevate psychic satisfactions above progress on changing a series of policies that are doing daily and almost vast damage to our country. Find me seventeen Republican senators who are going to convict President Bush in a senate trial.

On balance, this is still my position. But in recent days, for the first time I think, I’ve seen new facts that make me wonder whether the calculus has changed. Or to put it another way, to question whether my position is still justifiable in the face of what’s happening in front of our eyes.

Most of those facts I’m referring to stem from the on-going Gonzales controversy (farce?) and the various running battles over executive privilege. In fact, the exchange I noted yesterday between Gonzales and Sen. Schumer (D-NY) stands out in my mind.

This was the exchange in which Gonzales simply refused to answer one of Sen. Schumer’s questions — didn’t say he didn’t remember, didn’t invoke a privilege, just said, No. Not going to discuss that with you. Move on to the next question.

It’s not that this one incident is a matter of such consequence in and of itself — though I would say it’s pretty consequential. But it captures pretty fully and in one small nugget the terrain the White House is now dragging us on to.

As I explained in that post, testifying before Congress is like testifying in a court of law. The questions aren’t voluntary. You have to answer every one. You can invoke a privilege and the court’s will decide whether the argument has merit. But no one can simply decline to answer a question. And yet this is exactly what Gonzales did.

[ed.note: TPM Reader GK suggests that with a closer viewing of the testimony Gonzales actually does implicitly invoke executive privilege. After several times refusing to answer to the question and having Schumer state his understanding that no privilege has been invoked, Gonzales says that the question “relates to his time at the White House” and thus he won’t answer. This is significant; I won’t deny that. But I don’t think it changes the thrust of what I said in the post. It is too casual, flippant and implicit. I think it amounts to the same thing. They’re really not even going through the motions of invoking the privilege. It’s just, no. To evaluate the ins and outs of this, you can watch the relevant segment here.]

The difference between invoking a flimsy claim of privilege and simply refusing to answer has little immediate practical difference, but it’s constitutional implications are profound.

Though other events in recent months and years have had graver consequences in themselves, I’m not sure I’ve seen a more open, casual or brazen display of the attitude that the body of rules which our whole system is built on just don’t apply to this White House.

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn’t apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we’re moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I’m less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of ‘normal politics’ is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.

Can a March 10, 2004 White House meeting on the Terrorist Surveillance Program magically transform into a March 10, 2004 White House meeting on some other intelligence program? If Alberto Gonzales wants to avoid perjury charges, he’d better hope so.

(ed.note: This is a post I was working on a few days ago but had set aside. But with attention fixing again today on the Post’s editorial page’s egregious record of distortions on Iraq, I thought I’d pull it out of Movable Type oblivion.)

The Iraq fiasco provides few opportunities for mirth. But one is watching Fred Hiatt, czar of the Washington Post editorial page, try to kick up enough dust to wriggle out of his own position on the war.

A necessary preliminary to this discussion is to realize that there is probably no editorial page in the United States that has advocated more influentially on behalf of the Iraq catastrophe at every stage in the unfolding disaster — from the Iraq Liberation Act, the the WMD and al Qaeda bamboozlement, to the lauching of the war, to the longstanding denial of what was happening on the ground to the continuing refusal to brook any real change of course in policy. Other papers have been more hawkish, certainly. But because of its location in the nation’s capital and even more because of its reputation as a non-conservative paper, the Post’s fatuous and frequently mendacious editorializing has without doubt had a greater role in pushing the public debate into the war camp than any other editorial page in the nation.

Which brings us to the unsigned editorial that ran in the paper on Saturday, July 21st. According to the editorial, there’s an prevailing consensus in favor of a major change of course in Iraq. And all that is holding it up is the Democrats’ insistence on polarizing the debate for political gain. According the Post, most senators from both parties, the Baker-Hamilton commissioners and even the president are all part of the same broad consensus.

A large majority of senators from both parties favor a shift in the U.S. mission that would involve substantially reducing the number of American forces over the next year or so and rededicating those remaining to training the Iraqi army, protecting Iraq’s borders and fighting al-Qaeda. President Bush and his senior aides and generals also support this broad strategy, which was formulated by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission. Mr. Bush recently said that “it’s a position I’d like to see us in.”

The problem is insistence on “Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to deny[ing] rather than nourish[ing] a bipartisan agreement.” And this is so dangerous because we need to be discussing now what we do after September when we learn that the president’s ‘new way forward’ has failed.

The country will desperately need a strategy for Iraq that can count on broad bipartisan support, one aimed at carrying the U.S. mission through the end of the Bush administration and beyond. There are serious issues still to resolve, such as whether a drawdown should begin this fall or next year, how closely it should be tied to Iraqi progress, how fast it can proceed and how the remaining forces should be deployed.

Here we get down to the stem of a whole world turned inside out. ‘Serious issues still to resolve’ — like when to leave, whether to condition leaving on things getting better, how fast to leave and how many should stay and what we should have them do. I would say that covers quite a bit of the debate, doesn’t it? Indeed, that’s the entire debate, which is to say there’s little consensus on anything.

The Iraq debate now turns on two related questions: 1) the importance of Iraq to US national security and 2) whether we want to leave and will do so so long as various conditions in Iraq are met or whether we’ve decided that it is in our interests to leave and will begin to do so now without waiting for conditions to be met. All of the different permutations of the debate can be explained in terms of different answers to those two questions.

So what you have in the Post’s editorial is Mr. Hiatt’s desire to take a nominal and meaningless, a purely semantic point of agreement — that everyone would like to have most US troops withdrawn from Iraq — and stretch it so thin that it can cover most members of the senate, the president and even the Baker-Hamilton report that the president dumped in the trash last winter. Meanwhile the key questions that are the meat of the debate become points of detail that the members of the grand consensus still need to hash out if malefactors won’t keep on cynically injecting politics into the proceedings.

It is truly the world we are living in through the looking glass. And I think the reason for this outlandish contortion is not hard to see. Hiatt and the Post editorial crew can see the writing on the wall as well as anyone and the direction which public opinion is inevitably taking us. But they want to twist and distort and most of all stretch the terms of the debate so far as to appear to come out on the prevailing side of the public debate even as they never actually change their position, which has been a consistent and bullheaded advocacy of the position the entire country is now abandoning. So when troops come out of Iraq — due to the votes of the evil polarizers — Hiatt can say, yes, that was our position and it would have come sooner if Harry Reid would have just butted out of things.

Until then, of course, it’s full speed ahead with the surge.

Rothenberg: Al Franken can knock off Norm Coleman. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Senate Democrats are calling for a special prosecutor to probe Alberto Gonzales . . . more soon.

Update: We have video up at TPMmuckraker of some of this morning’s press conference held by Senate Democrats.

I hate to do a third post on “block cheese,” but this is just absurd.

The AP is running a story in which security experts praise the Transportation Security Administration for sending out a bulletin about suspicious items found in passenger luggage even though some of the alleged “incidents” were incorrectly reported by TSA:

Security experts and politicians–even longtime critics–praised the Transportation Security Administration’s warning that terrorists might be testing whether innocent-looking bomb components can be smuggled onto an airplane. . . .

The experts agreed that this judgment holds true even if the four incidents that triggered the warning turn out to have innocent explanations, as two of them – in San Diego and Baltimore – appeared to on Wednesday.

Say what?

First off, the San Diego incident didn’t just turn out to have an innocent explanation. In fact, a reasonable person might conclude that there wasn’t really any incident at all. The inspectors mistook an ice pack that was leaking for a ice pack stuffed with a clay-like substance similar to the consistency of plastic explosives–a mistake that was recognized on the spot after further inspection.

But even if you live in a perpetual state of paranoia and think that a 60-year-old lady with a leaking ice pack in her luggage constitutes an “incident,” how can you possibly praise the TSA for issuing a bulletin about the incident that gets all the facts wrong?

As the San Diego Union-Tribune discovered yesterday when it looked further into the so-called incident, the TSA bulletin said the ice packs were covered in duct tape and had clay inside of them, but local law enforcement said they weren’t covered in duct tape and didn’t have clay inside of them. “It is a little bit off,” a local official told the paper.

I’m all for TSA being proactive about security (up to a point), but this is just incompetence masquerading as hyper-vigilance. Getting facts wrong, mistaking utterly innocent behavior for threatening behavior, and over-reacting to perceived threats may be worse than doing nothing. It diverts and wastes limited resources and contributes to a panicky atmosphere that skews judgments.

We have to start being smart about security and counterterrorism and stop being so fearful.

The Senate Judiciary has issued a subpoena to Karl Rove for him to testify regarding his role in the U.S. Attorneys purge. Obviously, the White House will cite executive privilege and refuse to make Rove available, so we’re not going to see Rove under the kleig lights anytime soon. But it’s another step toward a long overdue confrontation in the courts on the true scope of executive privilege.

Having a hard time understanding all the details about how Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) paid half price for a prime plot of land on one of Alaska fishing rivers from Bob Penney, the same Alaska wheeler-dealer who’s tied to the investigation of Sen. Stevens (R-AK)? We know it’s hard to keep up. So we’ve got all the details here for you in today’s epsidoe of TPMtv …

Late Update: Wouldn’t you know it, turns out Murkowski had to catch and release.

Seattle Times: “Attorney General Alberto Gonzales portrays himself as the piano player in the bordello, unaware of what is going on around him.” [Via the KC Star, which has a cute cartoon.]

FBI Director Robert Mueller is testifying this afternoon before the House Judiciary Committee. Spencer Ackerman is providing updates at TPMmuckraker. Among other things, Mueller is being asked about that late night meeting at John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside. We’ll have more on that soon.