I agree that Bush has been an unmitigated disaster. And for gross incompetence alone the smart thing for this country to do would be to remove him from office. As to impeachable offenses, I think it would be easy to find quite a few. And ones that the majority of Americans would find arguably grounds for impeachment even if they were not 100% certain.
But the critical thing is what is best for the country. And impeaching Bush is not it. Lets go through why.
First, to be effective we would first have to impeach Cheney, then appoint a replacement Vice President, then impeach Bush. This process would take close to a year at its fastest. While many on the left are ready to do this in a day (a month tops), the country isn't. And the Republicans would move with due deliberation.
So you are looking at January of the presidential election year when we have a new president. At that time Bush will be a complete lame duck anyways. His effectiveness, with Iraq a disaster and congress having pounded him for a year, will be incredibly low anyways.
Second, the American public has only so much attention it is willing to expend on politics. If you're reading this you are probably like me and happily pay attention to numerous things happening in the political world. But for most people, 0 is the usual number of political issues they are watching. They're ok with 1 and occasionally 2. But that's it. So if we have impeachment, then we lose attention on Iraq, the economy, health-care, the environment, energy, etc.
Third, we, this country, needs to learn from our mistakes. The last 6 years have a large number of lessons for us. To learn from this we need to look at what was done, not who did it. Impeaching Bush allows everyone, including the right wing, to say the problem was Bush, not the policies. But if we leave Bush the person alone and instead look at the policies and actions of his administration, then we will be discussing what really matters - the moral, ethical, and practical bankruptcy of the right wing agenda.
For all of these reasons, the best thing for the country is to take impeachment clearly off the table. Instead let us concentrate on figuring out how to improve for the future and to learn what mistakes we made and to not repeat them.
And for those of you that want revenge, that hate Bush and want to see him suffer, don't worry. Impeaching him would make many feel sorry for him and would let him go out thinking that it was all just a political move.
But if he has to stay and answer for his actions and must continue to take action on issues from Iraq to the economy, then every day he is hit with the fact that he is failing and failing miserably. This will be worse for him than the absolution that impeachment would give him.
Sometimes having to finish the job is the worst punishment.
