This week on The View, Speaker Pelosi gave a completely insulting reason for not impeaching Bush:

If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story... unless you have the goods that this president committed these crimes.

As David Swanson rightly replied, "What rock have you been living under for the past seven and a half years?" before listing Bush's own confessions (wiretapping, torture) and prima facie cases (subpoenas, signing statements).

Today, Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel published a long interview with Pelosi and succeeded in getting - for the very first time - Pelosi's real reasons for opposing impeachment.

As it turns out, there is no single reason, but rather a mix of politics, policy, and stupidity. First the politics:

This is how I see it as Nancy Pelosi, not in my role as Speaker... why I ran for leadership and the rest. I was not setting out to win for two years. I did not want there to be any doubt in anybody's mind that this is going to be a long standing, get used to it, strong Democratic majority. So, in my head '06 was first, and then in '08 we strengthen and increase, In 2010, there's a little ebbing--assuming we have a Democratic President--and that's not traditionally been a big year. So we hold our own. So, 2006, we win. 2008 we grow and strengthen, and in 2010 we sustain and in 2012 with a new map: it's a whole new world. This map, we can only go so far with this map...redistricting...we need a whole new map. What we're talking about is only the next presidential election.

In other words, Pelosi is looking beyond 2008 to 2010 and 2012 and beyond. Therefore impeaching Bush in 2008 would only affect "the next presidential election," meaning 2008, and would have no impact on future Congressional elections.

That's true as far as it goes - by 2010, the impeachment of George Bush would have no political significance, just as the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton had no impact on Congressional races in 2000. But I don't know a single impeachment activist who supports impeachment because it would help Democrats in 2008, let along 2010 or 2012. The reasons we support impeachment are:

1. To stop Bush from committing the crimes he is now committing, like torture and wiretapping and ignoring subpoenas and negating laws with signing statements
2. To hold Bush accountable for the crimes he has committed
3. To deter future Presidents (including Democrats) from committing similar crimes

After politics, Pelosi moves on to policy, although her policy is intimately tied back to politics.

So my view in politics is deeply rooted in how I was raised in politics: It's all about economics. One of the reasons I decided to run for leadership is I thought it was absolutely urgent that we win. We see a situation where we have an economy where they are sucking the money out of the middle class. One percent of the people in this country control almost a quarter of the wealth...and it's at the expense of the middle class. We want to reward success and achievement, entrepreneurial spirit and the rest of that. But this is not what a democracy is about. So my whole thing was always about the middle class being this backbone of a democracy and I saw what was happening here was with the President and the Republican Congress a complete disregard--worse than that--for working families in our country. So I come into this picture with, they have to know we're here to stay, plus we have to have a predictable future. And I said before the election that impeachment was off the table. Now that means, in the set of facts that we know now the fact of the matter is that in order to impeach the President, you must have the information. Also, the fact of the matter is you don't get any information from these people. The further fact of this is that because of the judges that they appointed, we couldn't get any information about Cheney. So what is the risk-benefit of going down that route rather than saying we want to bring the country together so that we could win and continue to win and elect a Democratic President--absolutely essential--and change the economics of America?

This is going to be a caste system and I carry that burden as well as some more and the rest of it. I carry that responsibility. So my view of it is what is in the interest of unifying the country which--we have a responsibility to do, but to do so in a way that has a progressive economic agenda. And other people just see it as if we want it, we do this then we're going to win--well, I'm not sure.

This is actually quite interesting and worth discussing in greater depth. Pelosi believes Republican policies are creating a "caste system" in which the richest 1% steal from the middle class. She believes the only way to stop the Republican "war on the middle class" is for Democrats to convince Republicans that Democrats will control Congress for many years - that "we're here to stay."

Pelosi's economic strategy - stopping the richest 1% from destroying the middle class - is odd for a number of reasons. First, I don't think she ever presented this argument before. If she did, she got no serious coverage. Is this a secret strategy? If so, why?

Second, it's impossible to understand what this has to do with impeachment. Pelosi seems to argue that she can only accomplish her anti-caste strategy by "unifying the country," while impeachment would be divisive - or so she implies, without actually saying so.

But how would impeachment be divisive? Bush's support is below 30%, which is pretty much the irreducible Republican base. Democrats will never "unify the country" in a way that includes that 30%, as long as their minds are being controlled by all-day lectures from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and dozens of their clones. Is Pelosi too naive to understand this?

Congressional Democrats like to point out that President Clinton's polls went up during impeachment. But Clinton's approval was 60% before Monicagate broke in January 1998, and only went up to 65% because the Republican impeachment effort was so nakedly partisan. It's very hard to imagine that a serious, fact-based impeachment effort by Democrats would boost Bush's approval by 1%; it's much easier to imagine that Bush's approval would go even lower when his Constitutional crimes were fully exposed.

But perhaps Pelosi's idea of "unifying the country" isn't really about public opinion, but rather about the Republican Party and its powerful corporate backers. Does Pelosi think she can persuade Republicans to end their "caste war" through reasonable negotiations that exclude "hostile" actions like impeachment?

If so, Pelosi learned absolutely nothing from her "reasonable negotiations" with Bush over ending the occupation of Iraq, which led Bush to increase the number of troops in early 2007 by announcing "the surge."

If Pelosi really wants to end the Republican "caste war," Democrats need to work with the progressive movement to reach out to the middle class on bread-and-butter issues and broader issues of economic justice - not by giving massive taxpayer giveaways to wealthy investors in Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae.

After these digressions into politics and policy, Pelosi finally addresses a substantive impeachable offense - lying the country into war.

I have my own--what's the word I usually use about this--grievances about Democrats who voted for this war. We had a word that there was no intelligence to support an imminent threat to the United States. There was nothing. But when I was running to be Speaker they said, if you go against this war you will never go any place in this party. You're probably one of thirty-five people going against this war. I told them, I may be the only one but I won't be voting for this war. I had to oppose many Democrats, including the whip. That was a big deal. And also the Senate voted the wrong way--voted to give him the authority to go to war and use that power when there was absolutely nothing in the intelligence to support the imminent threat that the Administration was claiming...You've heard me say this before...when I said that at the time, they said you're calling the President a liar...I said I'm stating a fact. As it turns out, everybody knew that he didn't have...and now everyone's blaming it on the faulty intelligence. It wasn't there. So in terms of why should he be impeached? Because he took us to war? Well what about these other people who voted for that war with no evidence to tell them that this war? Are they going to be voting with us to impeach the President? Where are these Democrats going to be? Are they going to be voting for us to impeach a President who took us to war on information that they had also?

Of course this is an argument Republicans use all the time - how can Democrats impeach Bush for lying about Iraq when they repeated the same lies and voted for the war?

The obvious response is that Democrats cannot be blamed for believing Bush's lies. Everyone knows Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and everyone else in the White House lied repeatedly to the public on TV. But the Busheviks also lied to Congress in top-secret briefings. Bush should be impeached both for lying on TV and for lying behind closed doors.

Also, Pelosi's "head-counting" on the Iraq war vote is way off. There weren't only 35 Democrats who opposed the Iraq war, there were 126 - plus 6 Republicans and independent Bernie Sanders. Only 81 Democrats voted for the war, only 53 of those Democrats are still in the House, and several of those (like Jack Murtha) are now harsh critics of the war and of Bush. (Heck, even John McCain now claims to be a harsh critic of the war and of Rumsfeld, if not Bush.)

Still, Pelosi is correct in pointing out the problem that many of the 53 pro-war Democrats would have in impeaching Bush for his pre-war lies. But what about the other 35 Articles of Impeachment introduced by Dennis Kucinich?? Why can't all 236 Democrats impeach Bush simply for rejecting Congressional subpoenas - as they did for Richard Nixon? And why can't they impeach Bush for admitting he approved torture and warrantless wiretapping?

Pelosi ties her anti-impeachment arguments together in a strange melange of politics and policy:

How do you foresee that record being used?

I think that once we have a new President we can get more information because I think the country deserves the right to know. But we'll never get the goods on Bush to impeach him until we get the votes from the people who voted for the war, overwhelmingly, and what does that do to the country in light of the fact that the Republicans would have liked nothing better. You know who wanted us to impeach the President...it was the Republicans. All of that takes the attention away from what is the issue. They are sucking the money out of the middle class to the advantage of the wealthiest people in our country and they would like nobody to be paying attention to that. You want to go impeach the President, you want to do that...because it's all about money for them...the money their friends made on this war...the money their friends made getting us to four dollars a gallon at the pump...the transfer of wealth. So put me down as a very liberal progressive economic Democrat. We're here. I'll take the barbs, but I've got to keep us on course so that we can be a strong, assured, assumed-to-them, Democratic majority--so we can do what we have to do: healthcare, education, fairness and prosperity and let people participate in the prosperity of our country. It's only a decision and every decision has been made against working families in America and the leverage has been with the wealthy. I mean, these people at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they've joined the Wal-Mart club. That is to say, these people make in two weeks even more what it takes a minimum wage earner working full-time for his entire life. Something is very wrong.

Sadly, Pelosi's rant ends up being utterly incoherent and downright stupid. Even though Pelosi kept impeachment "off the table" for two years, there has still been no attention paid to the "wealthiest people" "sucking the money out of the middle class" - unless you're crazy enough to watch Lou Dobbs and mute his relentless immigrant-bashing rants. And instead of punishing the greedy executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Pelosi just gave them a massive taxpayer bailout.

Pelosi claims to be a "progressive" and her heart is in the right place. But her brain is somewhere else entirely - and it might require a drug test to find out exactly where.