Given the amount of cognitive dissonance Americans are apparenly willing to tolerate with respect to the actions of the administration they put in office, well, almost twice, I’m not going to bet on it: But the latest revelations in the NSA wiretapping affair might break Bush’s back. This, more than anything before, is bringing impeachment into the realm of possibility.

People are finally waking up – let’s hope it’s not too late. From the NYT –

“The concept of the N.S.A. having near-real-time access to information about every call made in the country is chilling,” said Mr. Bass, former counsel for intelligence policy at the Justice Department. He said the phone records program resembled Total Information Awareness, a Pentagon data-mining program shut down by Congress in 2003 after a public outcry.

Now that’s what I call a real summit for once: a standoff between two of America’s most talented comedians, George W Bush and Stephen Colbert, at the annual White House Correspondents dinner.

Here’s the BBC reporting on Bush’s performance – and here, via throwawayyourtv.com, is Colbert’s performance (25 minutes).

Truly a struggle of giants. I want the GW Bush show on Comedy Central now. Seriously, he’ll probably consider resigning the Presidency if he gets a good enough offer. The comdy thing is really what he should be doing.

And if it happens, remember you read it here first. See, Germans can be funny, too…

Update: Rightwinged.com has a video of Mr Bush’s performance. Perhaps not too surpringly, given the name of the blog, the author believes that Colbert delivered a weak show, based on the impression of relative silence during the performance. I don’t know how the sound was mixed but even if the “room full of liberals” he cites (Foreign White House Correspondents and the usual American political A-list suspects if they were not on a book promotion tour) was unexpectedly quiet, this was certainly the case because they must have had a hard time believing that someone would indeed dare to beat up the President seated on the Podium right next to him in the way Colbert did.

Two US state legislatures (Illinois and California) have introduced (though not yet passed) resolutions that would apparently force the US congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President Bush based on a little known floor rule (via opednews.com)

“Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson’s Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature.”

Well, we’ll see. First of all, the state legislatures have to pass the resolutions. The floor rule may have given the opponents a new lever to apply, but politics still do play a role in this. Still, these attempts are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Particularly given the fact that the Bush administration is caught in a negative feedback slope now: Revelations about misconduct reduce its political clout thereby leading to more revelations about misconduct, and so on.

Today’s exaymple? From ThinkProgress via Economist’s View –

“[Yesterday, on CBS] 60 Minutes, CIA analyst Tyler Drumheller revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.”

Watch it (quicktime).

By the way, according to the tape, the White House had no comment…

Anyone remember the controversy a Bush critical statement by the Dixie Chicks created back in 2003?

Well, those were days. Three years, a misconceived war, a press secretary, and a watergatesque scandal later, Bush bashing has finally gone mainstream again, even in the US. Still it’s not often as beautifully packaged as P!nk’s “Dear Mr President”, which you can listen to via YouTube. And while you’re at it, why not listen to my very own song GW Blues – you can download and play it right here. I wrote the lyrics in March and April 2003, and initially published it on afoe just before the 2004 US presidential elections.

As much as I would have then welcomed the current Presidential approval rates, now they are, in my opinion, possibly dangerous. The President’s severely limited legislative clout could prompt him to foreign policy activism – if in doubt what that could mean, read Seymour Hersh’s piece about “The Iran Plans” in the New Yorker. I still don’t think the US will attack Iran, simply because it would be such an overt example of acting against one’s own interests. But allowing the President to be a little busier at home would seem like a useful risk reduction strategy. Maybe he should go take that walk with P!nk.

By the way, the latter is always welcome to record a cover version of my song… ;)

I’ve always said that it’s important not to underestimate the American President. But I’m not sure that is actually possible. His Q&A session at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies is a box full of candy for Bush comedy of all kinds. Here’s a question by a first year graduate student about the legal regime private military contractors are operating under in Iraq. At least the President acknowledges it’s an interesting question – though I’m not sure he actually got it. But he’s gonna call his secretary of defense to ask. After all, that’s how he governs… quite right.

The NY Times about the technology that will be ending affirmative action.

Alan Moldawer’s adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual’s genetic ancestry.

The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.

…

Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights.

One Christian is using the test to claim Jewish genetic ancestry and to demand Israeli citizenship, and Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Indian scholarships, health services and casino money.

“This is not just somebody’s desire to go find out whether their grandfather is Polish,” said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University who has studied the social impact of the tests. “It’s about access to money and power.”

Wow, suddenly those demanding the impeachment of President Bush don’t sound too crazy anymore. Political power sometimes is such an elusive thing. So President Bush admitted to declassifying the NIE report so it could be used by his political operatived for political and PR reasons. Yesterday, he claimed to have done it so the American people could know “the truth” about his reasons for proposing to invade Iraq.

Well, if I were him, I’d stop using the word ‘truth’ for a lot of reasons. But that’s not the real point: the real point is – did he, on any level, authorize to blow CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover to threaten her husband to stop arguing that the administration was not ‘truthful’ about Iraq seeking to buy Uranium in Niger? If that were the case, I’m really not sure how, and when, his presidency would end. And for that matter, the vice presidency of Dick Cheney.

it also looks like the American so-called mainstream media is no longer that scared by the administration. Here’s an example, an MSNBC segment about the affair and the recent developments, posted on the “bradblog“.

Last week, in an interview with the BBC, Condoleeza Rice was still adamant, insisting on geographical facts, making it clear that “Iran is not Iraq.” On the other hand, reality based arguments have too often been denied their factual power by the Bush administration to simply believe her in this case. Seymour Hersh, for one, doesn’t believe that the ‘n’ makes the difference. He writes in the New Yorker –

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was ‘absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb’ if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do ‘what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,’ and ‘that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.’

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that ‘a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.’ He added, ‘I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?”

Good question, what are they smoking?