Bush ain't on the ballot this year, but his life depends on the results...or...Where's our Barry Goldwater?

Via Wolcott, Carl Bernstein, writing in Vanity Fair, is by turns shrill, then sensible, then totally crazy.

Worse than Watergate? High crimes and misdemeanors justifying the impeachment of George W. Bush, as increasing numbers of Democrats in Washington hope, and, sotto voce, increasing numbers of Republicans -- ?including some of the president's top lieutenants -- now fear? Leaders of both parties are acutely aware of the vehemence of anti-Bush sentiment in the country, expressed especially in the increasing number of Americans -- nearing fifty percent in some polls -- ?who say they would favor impeachment if the president were proved to have deliberately lied to justify going to war in Iraq.

John Dean, the Watergate conspirator who ultimately shattered the Watergate conspiracy, rendered his precipitous (or perhaps prescient) impeachment verdict on Bush two years ago in the affirmative, without so much as a question mark in choosing the title of his book Worse than Watergate. On March 31, some three decades after he testified at the seminal hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, Dean reiterated his dark view of Bush's presidency in a congressional hearing that shed more noise than light, and more partisan rancor than genuine inquiry. The ostensible subject: whether Bush should be censured for unconstitutional conduct in ordering electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant.

Raising the worse-than-Watergate question and demanding unequivocally that Congress seek to answer it is, in fact, overdue and more than justified by ample evidence stacked up from Baghdad back to New Orleans and, of increasing relevance, inside a special prosecutor's office in downtown Washington.

In terms of imminent, meaningful action by the Congress, however, the question of whether the president should be impeached (or, less severely, censured) remains premature. More important, it is essential that the Senate vote -- ?hopefully before the November elections, and with overwhelming support from both parties -- to undertake a full investigation of the conduct of the presidency of George W. Bush, along the lines of the Senate Watergate Committee's investigation during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

The trouble is, Carl Bernstein seems to be laboring under the delusion that the current state of politics resembles anything like 1974. As today, the Nixon era was a divisive time and partisanly bitter. However, the Mighty Wurlitzer that enforces strict party discipline on the Right had not yet powered up. In a Republican-led legislative branch 2006-style, there will be no real investigations, no hearings that will do anything other than give the Cheney administration the greenest of green lights. Regardless of the president's collapsing poll numbers and fears that he is a lead life vest for Congressional Republicans, any Republican to call for serious hearings would immediately be under fire by the bloviators on Fox News, the wingnutosphere, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Weekly Standard, Grover Norquist, the Bush controlled Republican party, and all the rest of the Right's apparati that currently set the terms of debate for Republicans. They would "expose" such a Republican as a traitor to the One True Cause, or worse, as a "RINO."

And the Cheney Administration knows this. They have no intention, therefore, of being hauled before a Democratically-controlled House. That's why Karl Rove is now working full time on the mid-term elections. And if you thought the 2000 election was stolen and the 2004 election more dubious still, you ain't seen nothing like what we can expect in 2006.