Tomorrow the World!

I just stepped in and out of the 2007 Take Back America conference, the would-be liberal answer to the Conservative Political Action Conference, cruelly-as-ever located at the Washington Hilton where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan. (Also located a few blocks away from reason's DC headquarters.) You'd expect the mood to be notably more bouyant than 2006's go-round, just as the 2007 CPAC was gloomier than the previous year. Not the case. Last year's TBA was optimistic, fightin'-mad, we're-all-in-this-together, with the only signs of discordance coming when Hillary Clinton spoke and refused to "set a date certain" to leave Iraq. Even then, the people who booed had arrived for the express purpose of booing–Code Pinkers, Raging Grannies, Unitarians for Palestine, etc.

This year there's the expected mass of mostly-white suburbanites, black ACORN workers, and bushy-tailed young folk (fewer college students than CPAC, thanks to summer vacations). The exhibit hall, full but under-trafficked last year, has been opened up with a coffee hutch and lots of sofas. But there's more ire than before because the Democrats are 1)angry that their Democratic Congress isn't doing more and 2)worried about winning the next election. Thus the booing of Ralph Nader, the slayer of St. Al Gore, and thus the shunting of unwelcome topics, like presidential impeachment, into rooms separated from the loud main hall by flimsy curtains.

I'd wondered for a long time why impeachment advocates think the issue should matter in 2008, given that, you know, George Bush will leave office after the election. Here's David Swanson of ImpeachPAC explaining why he's finding pro-impeachment candidates to challenge Democrats in their primaries.