Whatever you do, don't rile them up

Behold the Mighty Wurlitzer.

With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.

"Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all."

For weeks, Republicans have taken to conservative Web sites and talk radio shows to inveigh against the possibility, however remote, that Democrats could impeach Mr. Bush if they gained control of Congress. Mr. Feingold's censure proposal fell far short of a demand for impeachment. Most Democrats in the Senate distanced themselves from it, concerned that they would be tagged by Republicans as soft on terrorism. But the censure proposal provided Republicans an opening.

"This is such a gift," the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh told listeners on his syndicated radio program on Monday, saying the Democrats were fulfilling his predictions. "They have to go back to this impeachment thing," he said.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, a conservative standard-bearer, echoed the thought. "We'd like to congratulate the Wisconsin Democrat on his candor," its editors wrote Wednesday in a column headlined "The Impeachment Agenda." The Republican National Committee sent the editorial out to its e-mail list of 15 million supporters.

Their obsession with impeachment is innarestin'. They just can't seem to get enough of it. They're forgetting something, though. Clinton was, ya know, still relatively popular when they went after him for receiving a hummer. Bush's popularity rivals his father's at the end of the lesser pere's first and only term, and Bush II has, ya know, authorized illegal surveillance on American citizens. Kinda different.

But, really. We have to thank the Mighty Wurlitzer for giving us fair warning that our shrill Bush hatred is riling up their base, and to the New York Times for conveying the wisdom of Mssrs. Limbaugh and Weyrich. In light of this, Digby asks a timely question.