You read it here first.
Back on February 15, I flagged Paul Weyrich's article claiming that "if Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is Speaker of the House come next year George W. Bush will be impeached." Matthew Yglesias picked up the post on Tapped, and the impeachment meme started to go mainstream. Yesterday, as I noted, the Wall Street Journal editorial page claimed that a Democratic House majority would be likely to impeach Bush.
Today, David Kirkpatrick, one of the conservative "beat" reporters for the New York Times, picks up the story starting with Weyrich:
Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.
The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives' plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.
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."
Nice to see one of the liberal bloggers recognizes that all this talk of impeachment on the liberal blogs is a bunch of nonsense. Hope you don't take too much flak for it from the moonbats!
Posted by: Brainster | March 16, 2006 at 09:47 AM