Uh, folks? It's raining

More than 20 years ago, I saw a wonderful movie, directed by Rob Reiner and featuring John Cusack in one of his earliest lead roles, called "The Sure Thing." It's a road movie in which a guy named Gib (Cusack) and a girl named Alison (Daphne Zuniga) who attend the same college are both trying, for unrelated reasons, to travel cross-country to California on spring break. Through various misfortunes, some self-created, they wind up beside a two-lane road in the dark with no ride, and it starts raining heavily.

Alison: I have a credit card.
Gib: You have a credit card?
Alison: Yes. But my father told me only to use it in case of an emergency.
Gib: Well, maybe one will come up.

I thought about that scene when I read this week that almost no other Senate Democrats have come forward to support Sen. Russ Feingold's motion to censure President Bush for his illegal warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

As hilzoy at Obsidian Wings reminds us, no fewer than 21 Democrats and four Republicans, most of them still serving in the Senate, co-sponsored the 1999 resolution to censure Bill Clinton for lying about a consensual sexual affair.

Here you have a president who -- among other things -- has lied to Congress, who has started an illegal war, who has ordered torture in violation of both U.S. law and ratified treaties, has ordered U.S. funds extraconstitutionally reappropriated to pay for the initial Iraq invasion and who says that by God and sonny Jesus, whatever he wants to do is the law and screw the Constitution. No kidding; there's enough evidence on the public record right now to put George W. Shithead under the jail for the remainder of his sorry life.

And yet, of 44 Democrats in the United States Senate, the Greatest Deliberative Body on Earth™, only two think it's a good idea to tell the president that violating FISA and the Constitution like this is a bad idea?

What, are they waiting for an emergency to come up?