our long national nightmare...

Once again, I refer you to the most prophetic comment about the Bush Administration ever written.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784
But first, let's talk about Arrested Development. I've been using my now weekly free rentals from Blockbuster to enjoy this series. You may have heard the fulsome praise heaped on to this cruelly cancelled sitcom. There are no other superlatives I could add to "Best Sitcom Ever," so I'll just wax rhapsodic about its genius pitch and timing.

There has been much discussion in this general blogospheric region about the nature of satire due to the brilliant, if somewhat heavy-handed, spoof issue that is not officially from Chimes. In terms of television satire, while South Park and Family Guy may win in the Taco Bell/Slim Jim/XBox marketing demographic, these shows hardly qualify as satire as much as creative, absurdist, and abusive adolescent fantasies. Blue one-liners in Arrested Development such as, "I can blow myself," or, "My brother said we could do it," are spoken in context so flawlessly that one is laughing at the situation before the dirty joke even dawns upon the viewer. What makes Arrested Development truly effective satire is that, as in Seinfeld, sympathetic characters are made out of people whom in real life we would find completely morally reprehensible. The fact that the writers make this a running joke throughout the series merely highlights the respect they have for their audience. It also demonstrates their skill that the show never devolves into, "Nudge, Nudge. Wink, Wink. We're so self-aware that we're impossibly cool."

Of course, it is my opinion that intelligent history teachers of the future will teach the Iraq War to their students by showing them clips from Arrested Development much as they use the Wizard of Oz to teach the Gilded Age. I won't bother defending that statement, because I'd either ruin the series for anyone who hasn't seen it, or ruin it for myself by overthinking its perfectly tuned humor.

Speaking of miserable failures, back to W. There has been some suggestion on the liberal end of things, that if the Democrats win control of Congress, the Articles of Impeachment will be moved forward against our dear leader. While this merely seems like justice when one considers the purely spiteful impeachment of Bill Clinton, it strikes me as a tremendously bad idea.

If W. is actually impeached, it would merely prolong this long national nightmare of war, economic malaise, and partisan bickering. I can't see what problem it would solve. Consider that if W. were impeached, he'd probably never get convicted by ⅔ of the Senate, and even if he were, he'd only be succeeded by Dick Cheney, whom you know would never pull a Spiro Agnew, even if there were no more arteries left in his body by which his heart could be bypassed. Thus, we'd be forced to hold continual impeachment proceedings until the 2008 election, and we'd still have a hard right neo-con as president.

Consider that even if conservatives don't come out to vote in droves in 2006 for a third or fourth constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage which Karl Rove will most likely demand every state Republican committee to put on the ballot because of the gross incompetence of this administration and legislature, surely a drive towards impeachment out of pure spite would energize some of the base. More Congressional oversight of the war and rescinding the "tax cuts" is what will get us out of the Iraqi Civil War that we started (if that's what we liberals really want), and start us slumping back to gross penury rather than complete and abject dependence on Chinese credit.

Also, do we really want to set a precedent that every two term president is impeached in their second term? It's time for liberals to turn the other cheek—not so that we can be the benighted practicers of some kind of superior Christianity, but so that our politics doesn't descend into the kind of tit-for-tat quasi-anarchy of the late Roman Republic.

Of course, I have an opinion—don't I always? I think that we should change the constitution. No, I don't want to ban gay marriage for the seventeenth time. I do think that the 22^nd Amendment should be changed. I think that we should allow people to run for president as many times as they would like. However, I think that people should be limited to only one consecutive term in office. We'll call it the "Grover Cleveland" amendment. I think this would encourage presidents to always be mindful of public approval, but not be waging the "perpetual campaign" which Carter introduced to the Information Age. This would also reduce the risk of patriogastic "war goggles" which re-elected Madison, McKinley, LBJ, and W. in the midst or immediate aftermath of an ultimately foolish war.

Anyways, no one should be concerned about this actually happening, but as I have said before, "Blogito ergo sum."