Kucinich's historic Articles of Impeachment were the top story on Tuesday's Countdown with Keith Olbermann - which is now the #1 cable news show, beating out The O'Reilly Factor for the first time.

Olbermann and his guests treated Kucinich with tremendous respect - which formed a sharp contrast to the nasty coverage Kucinich received last November (led by the ineffable Countdown regular Dana Milbank) when he introduced 3 Articles of Impeachment against Vice President Cheney.

But there was still a fundamental problem with the analysis by Olbermann, Georgetown Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman: they missed three of the five major reasons for impeaching a President:

1. To stop one or more criminal activities being committed by the President
2. To put the President on trial for those criminal activities as a political punishment
3. To remove him or her from office as a limited form of accountability, namely losing the powers and trappings of the Presidency
4. To allow a President to be prosecuted under the law for full accountability, which is prohibited while (s)he is in office
5. To deter future Presidents from committing similar crimes

In the minds of Olbermann, Turley, and Fineman, the only reasons to impeach George Bush are #2 and #3 - to put Bush on trial and possibly remove him. But why are they missing the other three reasons?

1. Remarkably, none of them want to recognize that Bush's criminal activities are ongoing. The closest anyone got was Olbermann saying Bush should be removed even with just a few months remaining in his term because every day he is taking America to hell in a handbasket. But that was a ridiculously weak statement compared with the searing indictments in Olbermann's own "Special Comments."

In Iraq, Bush is still occupying a country that he invaded illegally at massive cost in blood and treasure, and his agents are still committing war crimes in some of their actions against civilians and prisoners. Here at home, Bush is still wiretapping Americans without a warrant, still defying Acts of Congress with signing statements, and still destroying all the evidence of his crimes to obstruct justice.

So the first reason to impeach Bush is to finally stop him from committing all of these crimes!

4. The concept of post-office prosecution was entirely absent from the conversation. Here Turley deserves the most blame, because he is the only lawyer among the three of them. Surely he understands that a former President can be prosecuted for crimes committed while in office. And when it comes to war crimes, there is no statute of limitations.

5. The concept of deterring a future President was also entirely absent.

So why did they ignore these three reasons, which are completely obvious to everyone in the impeachment movement?

Because the Washington elite - even the most "liberal" - refuse to recognize Bush's activities as not just bad policies, but actual crimes.

More broadly, they refuse to see George Bush and his administration as a criminal enterprise.

Here at Democrats.com, we recognized this shocking fact from the day they stole the Presidential election in Florida by order of a 5-4 Republican majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. That's because we recognized that the 2000 election was literally stolen through illegal voter disenfranchisement, most famously the "felon" purge uncovered by Greg Palast.

Until HBO broadcast "Recount," the Washington elite refused to even discuss the possibility that the 2000 election was stolen by George Bush and his corrupt Republican cronies on the Supreme Court. And now it is so long ago that none of them remember or care about the crimes.

But we at Democrats.com remember the Stolen Election of 2000 like it was yesterday. And despite the demands then - and even now from the Felon-in-Chief, Justice Antonin Scalia - we will never get over it.

And that's why we will insist on holding George Bush and Dick Cheney fully accountable for all of their crimes until the day they die.

Of course, those of us who understood that Bush stole the White House - and has led a criminal enterprise in the White House ever since - are not permitted on TV to articulate what 70% of Americans know deep in their hearts, because those of us who believe in "quaint" things like the Constitution and the Rule of Law are just DFH's - "dirty f**ing hippies."

But maybe someday soon Olbermann will let us on his show to finally break the deafening silence...