Scene from the Descent into Hell

In Which Two Assholes Blithely Admit the Bush Administration is a Criminal Enterprise, Despite Their Having Spent Years Ridiculing the Very Notion and Marginalizing Anyone Who Suggested It's So:

HOWARD FINEMAN: If you're in this White House, you want another Republican administration to follow. You don't want a Democratic administration coming in there while the evidence is still fresh, so to speak. To look at it the way—

CHRIS MATTHEWS: With the subpoena power—

FINEMAN: —with the subpoena power and looking through all the records and looking at all the decisions that were made. You want to cover over your two terms with a third term the way Ronald Reagan did with George HW Bush.

Charming.

Of course, given that the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi long ago took impeachment off the table, and given that the presumed Democratic nominee Barack Obama doesn't view any of the Bush shenanigans as "grave" or "intentional" breaches of presidential authority, and given that he was quite willing to fail utterly to hold the telecoms accountable for their role in illegally spying on Americans, and given that he couldn't be bothered to cast a vote of No Confidence on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and given that he voted to confirm Condi Rice as Secretary of State, even after her failures as National Security Advisor, and given the generally spineless, pathetic state of the Democratic Party as a whole, I don't think the Bush administration has anything to worry about in terms of being held accountable even if McCain loses.

There are individual Democrats who should be lauded for their efforts to expose the outright lawbreaking and ethnical breaches of the Bush administration, but none of them are among the party leadership. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama are some of the worst craven culprits of the lot—and there is, perhaps, no better indication of that than the sudden willingness of GOP hacks like Matthews and Fineman openly discussing the Bush administration criminality, because they know, despite what they say, that there will be no retribution for it.