It is very difficult to examine Carl Bernstein’s lengthy piece in Vanity Fair calling for a Senate investigation into the policies of the Bush Administration if, for no other reason, than trying to figure out the author’s purpose. There are times when Bernstein seems to be advocating the formation of a Senate Committee a la the Senate Watergate Committee (indeed, he cites the Ervin Committee endlessly as an example of good, bi-partisan government at work) and then there are times when he seems to be saying that we should simply skip the investigation and go right to impeachment.

Clearly, Bernstein was torn between trying to write an overview of what troubles him about the Bush Administration (and not coincidentally, Congressional Republicans) and a bill of particulars for impeachment and conviction of the President. In that respect, the article comes off as a vicious partisan attack, repeating every opposition charge made against the President over the last five years. Some of Bernstein’s charges actually border on the surreal as in his blaming Bush for “losing” New Orleans, as if the President could have held back the flood waters or moderated the winds of hurricane Katrina in some way. Botching the recovery is a legitimate criticism. Blaming the President for the weather is silly.

That said, Bernstein’s indictment cannot be easily dismissed. Nor should it be. Thoughtful Republicans, as Bernstein points out, have raised serious questions about many of the particulars the author uses to illustrate what he and the Democrats consider to be Administration malfeasance. Specifically, the roots of detainee abuse, the questionable legality of the NSA intercept program (of which no one can make a definitive legal judgement due to a lack of specifics), the continuing controversy over pre-war intelligence and whether it was “twisted” or simply mistaken, and a host of other issues that Bernstein says requires a bi-partisan Senate investigating Committee to examine.

Bernstein is dreaming if he actually believes it is possible for such a Committee to be formed by Republicans. He is being equally frivolous if he thinks that Senate Democrats would demonstrate even the minimum amount of bi-partisanship required not to turn the workings of such a committee into a three ring circus. And he cannot be serious in comparing the Senate Watergate Committee from 30 years ago – a time that the saw the three major networks taking extraordinary care in their coverage of the Committee’s deliberations – with any such committee convened today where cable news, Comedy Central, MTV, CMT, Pat Robertson, and even Al Gore’s Current TV would all be vying for audience and attention.

The world of news and news gathering have undergone a revolution since Watergate with not only the proliferation of news outlets but the way in which news itself is covered. I cannot imagine investigative hearings of the kind envisioned by Mr. Bernstein not degenerating into the most vile media spectacle of the age, a feeding frenzy that would render any judgement made by such a committee suspect in the eyes of most fair minded Americans.

Even more worrisome is the absolutely chilling effect such hearings would have on the Office of the President. There are legitimate questions regarding the questionable use of executive power by the Bush Administration. Only the most partisan Republican could say otherwise. It is part of the democratic process that these questions be asked, debated, agonized over, and examined closely for any actual abuse. But in an age of terror where a strong Chief Executive is absolutely essential to protect the homeland, can we afford another emasculation of Presidential powers as occurred in the wake of Watergate? Some of what President Bush has done to wage war against Islamic jihadists has stretched his enumerated and implied constitutional powers to the limit. For this reason, a serious examination by Congress may, in fact, be necessary to resolve questions of legality so that future Presidents will have the freedom – or be constrained as the case may be – to act surely and decisively on our behalf to protect us without worrying about whether the House Judiciary Committee will seek to throw him out of office.

In this respect, I agree with Bernstein that the Republican Congress has failed miserably. The last 5 years have seen the Congress abrogate its responsibilities as overseers of the American republic. Charges of corruption in war contracts, Katrina contracts, the waste of taxpayer’s money in both of those enterprises, and a lack of curiosity on the part of Congress to delve deeply into issues like domestic spying, detainee abuse, the war between the White House and the CIA, the Saddam documents, and even the leaking of classified materials that Mr. Bernstein applauds but which only the most rabid Democratic partisan would see as harmless to our national security.

But nothing happens in a vacuum. And the fact of the matter is, we live in a time when the opposition party simply cannot be trusted to maintain even the appearance of impartiality if such hearings were to convene. If this sounds like both parties are at fault for the current state of affairs, so be it. Both sides are being driven by rabid partisans that make up their respective base of support. This kind of polarization simply was not present 30 years ago when the Watergate Committee hearings convened and would today lead to judgements by a similar kind of investigative committee suspect in the eyes of nearly half of the electorate regardless of what evidence emerged or conclusions reached.

For Bernstein’s part, he makes many compelling arguments for investigating the President while at the same time offering some of the flimsiest evidence for impeachment:

Perhaps there are facts or mitigating circumstances, given the extraordinary nature of conceiving and fighting a war on terror, that justify some of the more questionable policies and conduct of this presidency, even those that turned a natural disaster in New Orleans into a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect. But the truth is we have no trustworthy official record of what has occurred in almost any aspect of this administration, how decisions were reached, and even what the actual policies promulgated and approved by the president are. Nor will we, until the subpoena powers of the Congress are used (as in Watergate) to find out the facts—not just about the war in Iraq, almost every aspect of it, beginning with the road to war, but other essential elements of Bush’s presidency, particularly the routine disregard for truthfulness in the dissemination of information to the American people and Congress.

The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and about the president, the vice president, and their political and national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice, to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed.

This “How often do you beat your wife, Mr. President” approach may score points in partisan Democratic circles but can hardly be taken seriously in any other context. For instance, the idea that dissent from Bush Administration policies has been overwhelmed is laughable. And hiding “inconvenient” facts and data from the press? This is an impeachable offense? Lying to Congress or concealing information from them would be a crime. Spinning data to put the best possible face on the news is an art form, one of the truly regrettable aspects of the modern presidency. Each succeeding Administration over the last 25 years has sought to manage the press and the information available to it. The idea of making such a practice grounds for impeachment is ridiculous.

Having said that, Mr. Bernstein’s point regarding the lack of understanding of how several high profile failures of the Bush Administration came about are good ones. Examining the decision making process and even second guessing executive department decisions is a legitimate function of Congress that Republicans have ignored. This is simply bad government and conservatives who care about this country should be outraged at the lackadaisical way in which Congress has gone about the vital business of oversight during the Bush Administration. They demonstrated no such reluctance during the Clinton years.
And while politics certainly plays a role in such decisions, oversight responsibilities even of the majority party must be embraced if for no other reason than to maintain the separation of powers between Congress and the Executive.

Will such investigations lead to the impeachment of the President? Here’s Bernstein’s summary of the charges:

Most of what we have learned about the reality of this administration—and the disconcerting mind-set and decision-making process of President Bush himself—has come not from the White House or the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security or the Treasury Department, but from insider accounts by disaffected members of the administration after their departure, and from distinguished journalists, and, in the case of a skeletal but hugely significant body of information, from a special prosecutor. And also, of late, from an aide-de-camp to the British prime minister. Almost invariably, their accounts have revealed what the president and those serving him have deliberately concealed—torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and its apparent authorization by presidential fiat; wholesale N.S.A. domestic wiretapping in contravention of specific prohibitive law; brutal interrogations of prisoners shipped secretly by the C.I.A. and U.S. military to Third World gulags; the nonexistence of W.M.D. in Iraq; the role of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in divulging the name of an undercover C.I.A. employee; the non-role of Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the events of 9/11; the death by friendly fire of Pat Tillman (whose mother, Mary Tillman, told journalist Robert Scheer, “The administration tried to attach themselves to his virtue and then they wiped their feet with him”); the lack of a coherent post-invasion strategy for Iraq, with all its consequent tragedy and loss and destabilizing global implications; the failure to coordinate economic policies for America’s long-term financial health (including the misguided tax cuts) with funding a war that will drive the national debt above a trillion dollars; the assurance of Wolfowitz (since rewarded by Bush with the presidency of the World Bank) that Iraq’s oil reserves would pay for the war within two to three years after the invasion; and Bush’s like-minded confidence, expressed to Blair, that serious internecine strife in Iraq would be unlikely after the invasion.

But most grievous and momentous is the willingness—even enthusiasm, confirmed by the so-called Downing Street Memo and the contemporaneous notes of the chief foreign-policy adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair—to invent almost any justification for going to war in Iraq (including sending up an American U-2 plane painted with U.N. markings to be deliberately shot down by Saddam Hussein’s air force, a plan hatched while the president, the vice president, and Blair insisted to the world that war would be initiated “only as a last resort”). Attending the meeting between Bush and Blair where such duplicity was discussed unabashedly (“intelligence and facts” would be jiggered as necessary and “fixed around the policy,” wrote the dutiful aide to the prime minister) were Ms. Rice, then national-security adviser to the president, and Andrew Card, the recently departed White House chief of staff.

Bernstein sets the impeachment bar extremely low which, in my mind, destroys his entire critique. “Misleading” the country in the lead up to the war would seem to be his most serious charge. But relying on the so called Downing Street “memos” would be problematic in the extreme. What exactly does” fixed” mean? And Bernstein’s characterization of intelligence and facts being “jiggered as necessary” is pure partisan spin.

This is not the only partisanship shown by Bernstein in the article:

Is incompetence an impeachable offense? The question is another reason to defer the fraught matter of impeachment (if deserved) in the Bush era until the ground is prepared by a proper fact-finding investigation and public hearings conducted by a sober, distinguished committee of Congress.

We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence—stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale. There will be no shortage of witnesses to question about the subject,...

The “question” of whether or not incompetence is an impeachable offense is ludicrous and if any Congressional investigation were to take it up would be grounds for committing the bunch of them. This is simply not serious and Bernstein should know it.

And Bernstein’s constant, annoying comparisons to Watergate smack of a certain kind of triumphalism on his part that dilutes his main arguments. Nixon’s impeachable offenses were committed against domestic political opponents. Bush’s transgressions – if any there be that would rise to the level of impeachment – would be against the enemies of the United States except for the question of the Administration’s pre war activities and the pushback against Joe Wilson’s lies (which should also be seen in context of the partisan warfare being carried out by the CIA against the White House).

But it is at the end of his piece that Bernstein proves he’s learned very little in 30 years:

After Nixon’s resignation, it was often said that the system had worked. Confronted by an aberrant president, the checks and balances on the executive by the legislative and judicial branches of government, and by a free press, had functioned as the founders had envisioned.

The system has thus far failed during the presidency of George W. Bush—at incalculable cost in human lives, to the American political system, to undertaking an intelligent and effective war against terror, and to the standing of the United States in parts of the world where it previously had been held in the highest regard.

There was understandable reluctance in the Congress to begin a serious investigation of the Nixon presidency. Then there came a time when it was unavoidable. That time in the Bush presidency has arrived.

Contrary to what Bernstein and the press have believed for 30 years, the “system” failed in that President Nixon was hounded to resign rather than go to trial in the Senate where he almost certainly would have been convicted. Our “system” does not include the press having the power to change who is President. That power is constitutionally reserved for the Congress. And George Bush is suffering from an excess of “hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale?”

The author’s crack about our “standing in the world” also shows a total lack comprehension on Bernstein’s part. This is part of the myth surrounding 9/11 where everyone supported us until George Bush blew it and made everyone mad at us. The outpouring of sympathy for the American people was unprecedented following 9/11. And so was the feeling of satisfaction on the part of even our closest allies that the government of the United States had suffered a blow. Former Ambassador to Great Britain Phillip Lader was reduced to tears on the BBC program Question Time 2 days after 9/11 by people in the audience who jeered and slow handclapped when he tried to defend American policy.

Is Bernstein correct? Is it time to investigate Bush? If there was a way it could be done that would guarantee even the appearance of fairness, I would be for Congress looking into some of the more problematic areas of the Bush Administration’s habit of sidling up to the line of legality with regards to the exercise of executive power. But since there is no way such an investigation wouldn’t degenerate into a simple exercise in partisanship, why bother? If the Democrats take control of Congress, they will have such a partisan investigation. And unless some “smoking gun” can be found that shows the President committing outrageously illegal acts, there is no way Bush would ever be convicted.

Bernstein’s article, a combination of thought provoking analysis and partisan hackery, should at least act as a catalyst for a discussion that is long overdue by Republicans regarding the state of their own house. Something must be done if the party is going to maintain not only its majority status but also the confidence of the American people. We might start by taking a hard look at the people currently in leadership positions and hold them accountable for their actions.

UPDATE

Ralph Luker makes the same point I made here about the danger of impeachment becoming a regular feature in Washington when there is divided government:

Of course, impeachment proceedings begin in the House of Representatives, not the Senate, but holding impeachment proceedings in the second terms of two presidents in a row would set a terrible precedent for the future of the American presidency. Two recent presidents have set some bad precedents, themselves, however; and there seems to be no other remedy short of enduring another 2½ years of this.