But it made a good campaign issue

In 2006 many Democrats were promising impeachment. Of course, they've done nothing (about anything they promised you), because, well, they're Democrats with approval ratings even lower than the President's. Not to worry; if you can find no impeachable offenses--go for impeachment-lite, a committee hearing where you can stack the deck with all your buddies from code pink, the Obamatites, and lefty authors who need to sell their trash rather than have it buried in the stacks. It's all about the cameras.

At one point, when Conyers told Cindy Sheehan she would have to leave if she didn't stop shouting from the visitors section, he called her by name, as if she were a special constituent of his. Which, in a way, she is now. Conyers didn't try very hard to keep the crowd quiet. He called them "visitors" but they were more like clients or patrons of the proceedings. . .

If you believe the president really told deliberate lies to take the country to war for personal or idiosyncratic reasons, you must believe the president behaved monstrously. But none of the Democratic witnesses--and none of the Democratic members of the committee--could keep their focus on the war. They also wanted to talk about Bush's abuse of executive privilege (by refusing to let White House personnel testify in congressional investigations), his abuse of signing statements (putting his own interpretation on enrolled bills while still signing them into law), allegations that he gave preference to Republicans at the Justice Department--charges that shouldn't be in the same league with wrongly dragging the nation into war.