One teeny, tiny little thing (PDX DL recap)

The top five topics at last night's Drinking Liberally get-together:

#5: The Foxworth allegations--is there anyway we can get to the bottom of this without, you know, going completely to the bottom? Ee-yew.

#4: Wormer--he's a dead man! Marmalard--dead! DeLay--dead!

#3: Visiting dignitaries in our city this weekend: Kevin Phillips on Friday, and Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga on Sunday and Monday.

#2: Voter-owned (but clearly not perfectly voter-controlled) elections: Is the glass half empty, or half full? (Side note: the California nurses, fresh from slapping Der Ah-nolt around last November, are now throwing their considerable clout behind public financing.)

And, from our home office at 9th and Hawthorne, the number one topic of discussion:

#1: Scooter Libby told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Bush authorized leaking information from an NIE on Iraq for political purposes.

As the Skirt mused, in an email I didn't get to until after the meeting broke up:

wow, could this be it? ...could this be the one small thing that will get gwb impeached and thrown out of office?

Well, I'm not very optimistic myself about impeachment, on a lot of levels (two words: "President Cheney")--but even in these dark times, anything's possible. After all, in the end it was fewer than fifty words that brought down Nixon (June 23, 1972):

Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, "Stay the hell out of this...this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it." That's not an unusual development,...

Nixon: Um huh.

And that, my friends, is a little thing we like to call "obstruction of justice." Once that tape was made public, showing Nixon planning to use the CIA to force the FBI off the scent, the game was all but over. (Of course, it was still more than 2 years from that conversation until Nixon's resignation.)

It doesn't seem as clear whether Bush would have broken the law by authorizing the Libby leak--and it's too soon to tell if he engaged in any other legal mischief connected with the NIE. And, of course, we can count on very little in the way of hard-nosed news media coverage this time around, and not even the whiff of a possibility of Watergate-style bipartisanship in Congress.

But--if the question is "after all the other things he's gotten away with, could one itty-bitty thing like this cost somebody the presidency?" the answer is definitely yes, it could.

So--now can we finally talk seriously about censure, at least?