something else is bugging me about Gene Healy's article

Gene Healy's article . . . about how come we don't impeach Presidents more often.

“Almost alone among industrialized democracies, the U.S. hews to the old-school regime of employment at will, which means most of us can be frogmarched out of the building at any time—for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.”

What the fuck is he talking about?  There are more than a few people I'd like to have seen fired---some firings that would have benefited me and my career, most that definitely would not---who could be removed from their positions only after painstaking cataloguing of their failures and fair warning that the cataloguing was going on.   Most, of course, were never removed.

In this we will include an ANG Major who, by the end of her six-month rotation to a sinecure in SW Asia, had not one but two members of our Group who demanded a witness to be in the room with them should they ever have to face her in private.  One of whom was her own First Sergeant.  Consequences to her?  She received a decoration that was below the level expected of her rank.  I can even visualize the C-5 pilot, who commanded the Group above her, grinning and saying to himself, "That will show her!"  Had an enlisted man behaved that way, he or she would have been on a rotator  back to the donor unit at about 45 days, and the donor unit would have been on the hook for a replacement. 

The old-school regime of at-will employment is a myth. 

Comments from my alter-ego Aubrey were left to that effect at the article.

While we're at it:  "This is the country that pioneered the idea of firing people as entertainment. For 14 seasons of NBC's reality TV game show The Apprentice, Americans tuned in eagerly to see which contestants would be shown the door with the signature line 'You're fired!'"

Because that's probably the only place where ordinary blokes get to see genuine accountability.  Don't confuse reality TV with reality. 

(updated)  After some reading, it seems that 'employment at-will' is legal shorthand for the opposite of prior English law, which supported seasonal employment, renewable for a year at a time. Even legal descriptions of the current state of at-will employment concede that employers can't fire without cause.  'At-will' is a misnomer.