A funny thing happened after getting to the Forum 2,051 years ago today

I wonder if the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 B.C., would have been viewed differently were it not for the plays of William Shakespeare. Not to mention Dick and Liz. After all, Marc Antony's "friends, Romans and countrymen" speech is difficult to counter. The delicious irony of the refrain, "but Brutus is an honorable man," outclasses any prosaic recitation of Caesar's self-aggrandizing moves to consolidate power after he crossed the Rubicon. It's worth bearing in mind, however, that Brutus, Cassius & Co. viewed themselves as the ancient Roman equivalent of the German generals who tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb; that is, as engaged in tyrannicide, not a coup.

It's 2,051 years later and the imperial pretender who walks all over the American Constitution and violates statutes (or signs "statements" vitiating the effect of new ones which inconvenience his autocratic designs) is in no similar danger from his own Senate. For one thing the Star System of the old Hollywood studios is gone; who would play Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid) and La Diva (Nancy Pelosi)? Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston? I don't think so either. The modern American Senate is full of the Boy Emperor's (in Chalmers Johnson's descriptive term) enablers who are aware of Bush's numerous outlandish high crimes and misdemeanors but consider it impolitic to do anything about it. I have thought since November 2006 that the importance of impeaching George W. Bush is less about the immediate benefits of removing a dangerously incompetent leader with totalitarian instincts from office than it is about the cleansing and expiatory effect of reaffirming the Constitutional rule of law. If we tolerate, for example, the wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law by Bush and his cronies, and allow them to cloak the true extent of their invasions in secrecy; if we permit Bush to maintain a vast gulag of CIA prisons in foreign countries where "terrorist suspects" are routinely tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions; if we buy into the patent nonsense that "enemy combatants" can be jailed indefinitely without judicial recourse by a specious analogy to the treatment of Japanese and German soldiers during a conventional war with a finite duration; if we aid and abet the continuation of a war started on false pretenses under the color of an "authorization" that is clearly no longer even putatively applicable; if we do all this, and considerably more, then we are saying that from now on we will tolerate the concept that Presidents can act illegally without any consequences other than pointless "criticism" or the occasional demand that some subservient official be symbolically canned by the Administration.

I do not understand why Nancy Pelosi believes that impeachment must be "off the table." The clearest case ever presented for impeachment now exists. The House Judiciary Committee would probably need five or six months to air out all the misprision and illegality in which Bush & Co. have engaged during their first six sordid years.

Yet I suppose the Democrats are going to let it ride. They are so enmeshed in Beltway politics and personal careerism that they have lost sight (with a few blessed exceptions, such as Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold) of the big picture. If this neglect persists, I am concerned a terrible price will be paid down the road. The original idea that no President is above the law will be lost as the "precedents" established during the Bush Administration cohere into fixed tradition. Exceptions to Constitutional principles for "national emergencies" and "dire threats" will be seen as routine and tolerable, and Americans will get used to the idea of police state tactics and "necessary" curtailment of liberties. A terrible mistake, anticipated many times in history. Brutus and Cassius saw it coming in their own day. They just needed someone writing better lines to vindicate their legacy.