In today's Washington Times, Tony Blankley offers a searing assessment of the state of the Democratic Party. His conclusion, after watching the Democrats during President Bush's State of the Union address:

Somehow the Democratic Party — for 180 years the most electorally successful political party on the planet — has now almost completely mutated into a party too loathsome to be seen in public, and too nihilistic to be trusted with control of even a single branch of government.

Blankley also notes the growing sentiment within the Democratic Party for an effort to impeach the President:

[N]ot satisfied to be a head-in-the-sand, reflexively negative opposition party, an increasing number of Democrats and their supporters in the leftish fever swamps have started calling for President Bush's impeachment.

While I haven't seen any polls yet on the subject, I would guess that something less than 10 percent of the American voting public would look forward to seeing the last two years of the Bush presidency consumed with a Democratic Party-controlled Congress trying to impeach the president during a time of war.

I think that's true. But I also think that a considerable part of the Democrats' current pathology dates from the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I thought at the time, and still believe, that impeaching Clinton was a mistake. Unlike most Democrats, however, I don't think it was politically motivated. On the contrary, it was obvious at the time that the most politically expedient course was a censure vote, followed by ridicule. And the last thing any Republican wanted was to make Al Gore the incumbent President.

Clinton's impeachment was certainly justifiable--like Nixon, he obstructed justice; worse, unlike Nixon, he lied under oath--but in my view, the whole sordid affair didn't rise to a level that warranted the nuclear option of impeachment. Reasonable minds can differ about that, and when the process was over, Republicans moved on. Many Democrats, somewhat ironically, did not. They remained enraged that the right to lie about sex--it's got to be in one of those amendments, somewhere--had been infringed, and they've remained enraged, in many cases, right up to the present. So the current talk about impeaching President Bush was pretty much inevitable.

And I do think that if the Democrats regain the House in November, the Judiciary Committee, under John Conyers, will in all probability conduct impeachment hearings. I don't think the public has any appetite for impeachment talk every time the Presidency and the House are held by different parties, but the Democrats won't be deterred. They're bent on revenge, even if it doesn't help them any more than impeaching Clinton helped the Republicans.

Which is one of many reasons to do all we can to ensure that the Democrats don't retake the House.