Independent weekly columnist and author Hal Crowley was no doubt already working on this masterpiece when headlines proclaimed that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would — incredibly — not yet consider impeachment an option for either Bush or Cheney.

Crowther tries to MOVE US ALREADY from our collective inertia and the delusions we’ve accepted about what we have to lose by leaving Iraq (nothing) and by impeaching Bush/Cheney (nothing).

He also asks a damn good question.

The Bush administration is a cadaver decomposing on America’s doorstep—yet no one will take responsibility for it, no one will give it a decent burial, no one even has the courage to step over it and try to get on with a nation’s decent business.

Democrats are so desperate to win the presidency in 2008 that they refuse to relinquish their two most persuasive, most visible arguments for regime change

This is the president who cannot be resuscitated and cannot be removed. A lame duck is a thing we’ve dealt with before…A dead duck in the White House is a constitutional crisis no scholar ever anticipated and no think tank ever analyzed.

The president’s Memorial Day speech at Arlington was a crowning outrage, one that pushed many a patient, hopeful citizen over the edge into incoherent despair… “Now this hallowed ground receives a new generation of heroes,” he declaimed. “I hope you find comfort in knowing that your loved ones rest in a place even more peaceful than the fields that surround us here.”

…Hypocrisy of such concentrated toxicity seems almost superhuman. “Shame!” the dead cry, but in America, shame died years ago and lies buried in an unmarked grave, perhaps at Arlington…

As Baghdad disintegrated, body bags proliferated and his henchpersons’ interlocking scandals reverberated—as his approval rating scraped bottom near an historic 25 percent, meaning he’s squandered the trust of at least half the people who voted for him in 2004—President Bush faced no future but no certain reckoning. Can no one rid us of this albatross?

…Across the country, from Hawaii to Maine, 70-odd city councils and 14 state Democratic parties have voted to impeach both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney…But in Congress no one seems to have the stomach for the job.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would move to the White House if a double impeachment succeeded, declared last winter that impeachment is “off the table.” The most convincing explanation for her reluctance, the one I keep encountering, is that Democrats are so desperate to win the presidency in 2008 that they refuse to relinquish their two most persuasive, most visible arguments for regime change…

Eighteen more months of the Mesopotamian meltdown might work out well for the Democrats, and for whichever candidate survives the infamous cannibal orgy they call the nominating process. It won’t work out so well for the hypothetical nation formerly known as Iraq, where as many as a million citizens may now be dead or disabled and two million have fled the country, 3,000 more every day…

A genocidal civil war was not a thing Bush anticipated, though of course he should have. If the destiny of Iraqi Muslims is to slaughter each other to the last man over what most outsiders regard as arcane theology, no one and nothing is likely to save them. But congressional schemers are responsible for another class of victims who can ill afford 18 more months of partisan gridlock with a dead-duck president dangling portentously in the butcher-shop window for the benefit of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. These victims wear the uniforms of the United States armed forces…

The numbers are numbing—3,500 dead, 26,000 wounded, 45,000 suffering from post-traumatic stress. And yet more depressing than the neglect of the wounded at Walter Reed was Mark Benjamin’s story for Salon documenting the fate of the walking wounded from this ghastly miscarriage of a war: They’re shipped back to the battlefront as soon as they can feed and dress themselves…Individuals serving their fourth and even fifth tours of duty are common; 80 percent of the Army National Guard has already been deployed in Iraq, and guardsmen have suffered heavy casualties…

Naturally, many soldiers resist perpetual combat, leading to tragedies like the death of Sgt. James Dean, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Dean went on an armed, drunken rampage when he received his redeployment notice (”I just can’t do it anymore”), confronted deputies with his shotgun and was shot dead by a state police sniper on the front porch of his parents’ house in Maryland. Naturally, morale in Iraq is at a poisonous low. After his unit killed a man setting a roadside bomb and identified the dead man as an Iraqi army sergeant, Staff Sgt. David Safstrom of the 82nd Airborne unburdened himself to New York Times reporter Michael Kamber. “What are we doing here? Why are we still here?” asked Sgt. Safstrom, serving his third tour. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

“Why are we still here?” is a question the sergeant should ask the Democratic presidential candidates, who are belatedly united in calling for a troop withdrawal but unwilling to push for impeachment or for a military draft, a measure so unpopular it might end the war overnight, along with the careers of the politicians who supported it. Is the sergeant still there because the Democrats want to win the White House so badly?

Lord, I hope not. But why do I dread the answer? And why are the only Democratic candidates calling for an immediate withdrawal the ones who are not in Congress or the Senate? Like Bill Richardson and John Edwards?