political notions

Impeachment means golf courses: an early vacation. The U.S. is extremely merciful to its presidents. We don't want to think of any president as a rogue, as someone to throw into a prison. Unfortunately, many Germans didn't think Hitler was a criminal, either, until it became apparent, but too late to do anything about him.
President Bush ran for office as Bush in 2000. His stint as governor of Texas was not a secret, his stance on the death penalty was not a secret, and everyone knew that he was an ultra-conservative Christian candidate running for office. But what many people did not know was that presidents Reagan and Clinton destroyed liberalism and the Democratic Party, respectively. Reagan obliterated LBJ's Great Society with deep cuts in the domestic budget, and Clinton shook hands with Newt Gingrich before slashing what was left of Roosevelt's New Deal: Welfare. In 2000, Bush ran against a newly designed Democratic Party. Neo-conservative, no longer liberal, the "Centrists" or "Moderates" ran against the Republicans, still exploiting the GOP's themes for a quick win, as President Clinton had done before them. The voters cast their votes along Republicans, or along with a nearly identical party, the Democratic Party.
No matter who wants to fault Bush, the fact remains that enough of this country, including Democrats, supported him for seven years. They still support him. The recent spy bill passed without too many contentious sparks on Capitol Hill. The Democrats in Congress still refuse to call Bush a rogue, or a liar, or anything that might insult his office.
We exist as a two-party system, but we have one political mind. A conservative one. There is almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats at this point. The Democrats want to win according to the recipe that President Bush concocted in last two elections: say you are a Christian, that you have faith; say that you are not a liberal, that you support military buildups, that you support GATT and NAFTA and the global economy, but that you are charity-minded around the gills.