Izvestia, Pravda & Granma sharpen knives for Hagel

Book it.

The Republican radio counterparts to yesteryear's Soviet "newspapers" Izvestia and Pravda -- not to mention to the still-the-same Cuban party rag Granma -- are about to aim the big guns at one of their own. Again.

Only now, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are going to break out the nuclear bunker-busters for Nebraska's senior U.S. senator, Chuck Hagel.

Hagel used the I-word in public. And "I" is for Impeachment. As in, if President Bush continues to flout the will of the people and their Congress to persist in his catastrophic adventure in Iraq, impeachment is one option for dealing with the problem.

Sounds reasonable. And they're gonna kill Hagel for statin' the obvious . . . .

Here's the deal, according to The Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - With his go-it-alone approach on Iraq, President Bush is flouting Congress and the public, so angering lawmakers that some consider impeachment an option over his war policy, a senator from Bush’s own party said Sunday.

(snip)

GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent critic of the war, stopped short of calling for Bush’s impeachment. But he made clear that some lawmakers viewed that as an option should Bush choose to push ahead despite public sentiment against the war.

“Any president who says, I don’t care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don’t care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed — if a president really believes that, then there are — what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that,” said Hagel, who is considering a 2008 presidential run.

The White House had no immediate reaction Sunday to Hagel’s comments.

The Senate planned to begin debate Monday on a war spending bill that would set a nonbinding goal of March 31, 2008, for the removal of combat troops.

That comes after the House narrowly passed a bill Friday that would pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year but would require that combat troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 — or earlier if the Iraqi government did not meet certain requirements.

On Sunday, Hagel said he was bothered by Bush’s apparent disregard of congressional sentiment on Iraq, such as his decision to send additional troops. He said lawmakers now stood ready to stand up to the president when necessary.

In the April edition of Esquire magazine, Hagel described Bush as someone who doesn’t believe he’s accountable to anyone. “He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don’t know. It depends on how this goes,” Hagel told the magazine.

(snip)

“We have clearly a situation where the president has lost the confidence of the American people in his war effort,” Hagel said. “It is now time, going into the fifth year of that effort, for the Congress to step forward and be part of setting some boundaries and some conditions as to our involvement.”

“This is not a monarchy,” he added, referring to the possibility that some lawmakers may seek impeachment. “There are ways to deal with it. And I would hope the president understands that.”

AT THE END of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked delegate Benjamin Franklin what kind of government he and his confreres had wrought. His response: "A republic . . . if you can keep it."

Unfortunately, when a chief executive starts to behave like a monarch, sometimes there is only one way -- short of bloody insurrection -- to keep it. Keep our republic.

That's the elephant (no pun intended) in the parlor that Chuck Hagel, wounded twice in Vietnam, dares to point out. And all the GOP's Imperial Guard wannabes are gonna make him pay for that bit of candor.