Woodward and Bernstien are hacks...

In today's Daily Texan, the UT paper, Woodward, Bernstein discuss government corruption, faults."

This is ironic. Just the other day someone mentioned Woodward and Bernstein, and their journalistic integrity, and I thought to myself "Yeah, where are those guys?" Woodward and Bernstein took down the Nixon administration through tenacious investigative journalism, I'm told. Surely Woodward and Bernstein wouldn't break a sweat tearing down the Bush regime. The fifth-grader who reads the lunch menu over the school loudspeaker every morning wouldn't have any trouble digging up enough dirt on Bush to have him executed for treason. "What would Woodward and Bernstein say," I wondered?

I didn't know much about Watergate. It was before my time. Even my older friends would have been in grade school at the time. For a refresher this evening, I perused the Washington Post's Watergate Time-line, which has handy links to all the relevant Post stories. So now I know roughly what happened with Nixon, and that Woodward and Bernstein wrote down what "Deep Throat" (a porn classic) told them.

Good job, guys, but what have you done for me lately?

So what do these heroic living testaments to journalistic integrity have to say about the Bush administration?

"It's better to have a criminal president than an incompetent president," Woodward said. "Nixon was impeached because his actions were criminal, while the actions of many incompetent presidents do far worse damage, but aren't grounds for legal action," he said.

There's no law against stupid.

I won't get into an indictment of Bush II. Everyone knows enough to have him hanged from the nearest street-lamp, and his daddy, too, and his granddaddy if anyone feels like digging up his putrid, syphilitic corpse.

Okay, you got me. I made up the syphilitic part.

It's not necessary for a president to break the law to be impeached, though. Wil S. Hylton, a writer for GQ, wrote in THE PEOPLE V. RICHARD CHENEY that "Only two conditions must be met (for an impeachment). First, a majority of the House of Representatives must agree on a set of charges; then, two-thirds of the Senate must agree to convict. After that, there is no legal wrangling, no appeal to a higher authority, no reversal on technical grounds. There is not even a limit on what the charges may be," and "as Gerald Ford once pointed out while still serving in the House of Representatives, the only real definition of an 'impeachable offense' is 'whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.'"

Mr. Hylton goes on to list historical grounds for impeachment: "The reasons for impeachment have ranged from the outrageous to the banal: from putting political enemies in jail (Judge James H. Peck, 1830) to cheating on taxes (Judge Harry E. Claiborne, 1986); from being rude to Congress (“unmindful of the harmony and courtesies which ought to exist and be maintained between the executive and legislative branches,” President Andrew Johnson, 1868) to being a drunkard (“a man of loose morals and intemperate habits,” Judge John Pickering, 1803). One president was even impeached for having the good taste to keep his sex life private (concealing “the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee,” President William Jefferson Clinton, 1998)."

I tried to find out what Woodward and Bernstein have done since Watergate, and it appears they've spent the last forty years milking their one big story. They're the Walter Koenig (he played Chekov in Star Trek) of journalism, signing autographs for five bucks a pop at Watergate conventions.