There has been plenty of ink spilled and hot air expelled the last couple of days by members of the Reality (sometimes) Based Community over Senator Feingold’s proposed censure resolution. The dominant theme seems to be that the netnuts are upset that more Democrats aren’t rushing to the battlements to hold the Senator’s coat while he waves the bloody shirt before jumping off the catwalk into the alligator-infested moat below. Democrats being a canny breed, are fond of their political skins and do not look kindly on someone who exposes them to the prospect of ravenous media beasts taking huge chunks out of their hides in a doomed effort to prove…what exactly?

Well, according to Senator Cheesehead, we must censure the President because he “knowingly broke the law” by intercepting the domestic end of al Qaeda overseas communications while not informing the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This “fact” is not in dispute according to the netnuts. In truth, the “crime” is stated matter-of-factly, as if all the details of the NSA intercept program were common knowledge and there is unanimous agreement among legal experts that the President did indeed knowingly violate the law.

As to the former, what we don’t know about the program (and others like it) could fill the gaps between the ears of all the mindless loons who seek to censure a sitting President during wartime. To the latter, I would simply say Google up “NSA intercept program + legal” and scroll through a few pages. There is plenty of legal fodder for disputatious argument on both sides. To posit the notion that the issue of the program’s legality is settled is to betray both an ignorance of the facts and an arrogance of mind that has lately come to define the desperation of the President’s critics.

At bottom, the problem that Democratic Senators have is part political, part practical. Politically, they would be hard-pressed to justify voting for a motion of censure based largely on the President’s actions running a program that they support. That’s because unmentioned in all the unhinged rhetoric coming from the netnuts is the fact that very few Senators have come out and said they want the program to end. And a good case can be made that one would look like an idiot voting for censure when the censurable action is considered by the Senator to be justifiable in our present circumstances.

From a practical standpoint, only losing Roman generals and liberal netnuts fall on their own sword in order to make a point. And since the Democratic party fully realizes that the mess made by Republicans in Congress as well as several high profile missteps by the President and his people have given them an opening to take back one or both Houses of Congress in November, there won’t be too many sober-minded Democrats to jump on board the Cheese Train headed for Censureland.

The censure ploy is, in part, a creation of the far left who seek to sow the seeds for impeachment if, in the unlikely event, the Democrats were to overturn Republican control of both Houses of Congress. Despite the small chance of such a “World Turned Upside Down” scenario, the netnuts are beside themselves with anticipation. What is curious to me is that the professionals in both parties are oblivious to the probability that if the left were to regain control of the Congress, impeachment would be the number one priority:

Few lawmakers in either party think there is much chance of impeachment even if the Democrats do take the House. Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, called the idea “not realistic” but nonetheless useful. “It shows people how extreme the leaders of the Democrat Party actually are,” Mr. Forti said.

Mr. Forti is whistling past the graveyard if he doesn’t think that the day after November elections showing Democrats in control, Kos & Co. as well as every lefty loon in the United States wouldn’t be salivating for impeachment. And lest anyone think that this doesn’t matter, I urge you to look back at the confirmation debate over Judge Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court. For weeks we heard the professionals say that a filibuster was impossible, that no one would attempt it. All it took for a filibuster to materialize was the netnuts going ballistic day after day before John Kerry answered their call, pandering as he did to a segment of the party whose support he was seeking for his 2008 Presidential run.

There are few scenarios for November that involve the Republicans losing both Houses of Congress. But that won’t stop the loony netnuts from pushing this censure resolution until they shame (or frighten) Democratic Senators into coming out in support of it. Expect the motion to be voted down in Committee but brought to the floor by Bill Frist himself who, like Speaker Hastert’s ploy of bringing Representative Murtha’s cut and run resolution on Iraq to an immediate vote, will seek to hold Democratic Senator’s feet to the fire and dare them to vote to punish the President for running a program they want to see continued.