Letters to the Editor
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psyberdawg
Modern day "Republicans" have shown themselves to be very different animals; I don't think any amount of mendacity will make them turn on Bush.
True. But I suspect that it won't be mendacity that makes at least some of them turn on Bush, but rather fear, panic and the survival instinct. The only question is when, how many, and how much. Because we're going to need a lot more than pretty speeches on the floor of the senate and plaintive expressions of concern to get anything meaningful done here.
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@kovie
I don't find much to quibble with you about your post, except that I think you need to drop the law of the excluded middle. The Dems have made some strategic errors -- they should have been forcing the filibusters all along, and not billed them as discussions, but tarred them as intransigent Repubs who refused to accept the results of the election. They need to be less afraid of making a mistake. And they need to stop treating every transgression of the Administration as a fund raising opportunity, and start treating them as oration opportunities.
As for us, out here screaming blue murder and yelling ourselves hoarse about impeachment: It's all the same push, you know? The Congress has its role, we have ours. The combination of the two roles, plus the people who write to their newspapers and heckle the public editors, is having an effect.
Marching in the streets will have its effect too, when it happens, and civil disobedience, and rock concerts, and all the rest. And impeachment. Congress is wrong to say that anything "is off the table." And starting an inquiry into the possibility of impeachment wouldn't be a bad idea, especially for a group of people who hound their opponents for a "Plan B".
The law of the excluded middle says you have to pick one or the other. The Congressional strategy is right. The ACLU strategy is right. No, No, the protest strategy is right.
Holism. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But that doesn't mean that any one part doesn't deserve criticism. The criticism is a part, too.
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Ah....
Kovie, thank you...I just didn't have the energy, and I was hoping you would. Your analogy to the Second Front made me smile. I imagined you as FDR and Marshall, holding off Stalin with one hand and Churchill with the other while slowly, methodically planning Operation Overlord.
I thought of the dark side, too -- of Bataan, Corregidor and Guadalcanal. No, love, no supplies, dying of all sorts of things, from bullets to malaria, and trying to keep the faith. They had no idea of the Arsenal of Democracy, no idea of the grand plan, no idea even of such symbolic gestures in their direction as the Doolittle raid. That didn't make me smile at all.
I believe, as you do, that a careful strategy is best. I believe with ondelette that we on the home front must keep holding the Democrats' feet to the fire. I hope above all that the people will see beyond the Kabuki of the strategists, and come eventually to understand why we fight.
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@kovie -- There is no line to cross
These people ran off the end of the pier a long time ago. They are already responsible for a war of aggression, torture, disappearing people, illegal detention, illegally spying on US citizens, obstruction of justice. The list goes on and on. The declaration of a unitary executive as defined by their version of executive privilege is, in my mind, nothing less than an overt and criminal attempt to overthrow the US government and to declare the Constitution and the Bill of Rights null and void.
In short, they are treasonous. They are criminals. They are irredeemable.
There is no line to cross. They have already crossed it a dozen times.
The America we live in today is not the same America we lived in in 2000. The malls and SUVs and cable TV are still there. But our democracy is shattered. 9/11 did not shatter it. We did.
To talk of a 2008 election, the eventual restoration of habeas corpus and so forth is almost beside the point.
The Congress should be raging against this President and his criminal cabal. The Congress should be doing everything in its power to reestablish the rule of law.
It has not. And that says it all.
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Besides...
...unlike the results of some of the others here, when I wrote my Congressman about impeachment, I got an email back saying that he was a cosponsor on the resolution to start the impeachment inquiry. What can I say? Left Coast, Indigo State, old style representative.
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@ Kovie
Nixon was not impeached. Two men were instrumental in getting him to step down, both Republicans. Pete McCloskey made the first floor speech suggesting impeachment.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0717-19.htm
Then a group of GOP heavies, led by Goldwater, went to Nixon and convinced him not to put the country through that (I think that Nixon only had 12 votes out of 100 Senators). There are no Republican heavies in the GOP, today and even Bush is no Nixon. He'd just tell them to "bring it on".
Here is a Republican's view:
The Long Shadow of Watergate and Republican Roads Not Taken ...
The full-throated accolades to and tendentious assaults on Ronald Reagan's historical reputation will make this a tedious week for me.
I am a Republican who voted against Barry Goldwater on the issues in 1964. Subsequently, I am certain that Goldwater was a man of integrity beyond anything Lyndon Johnson could imagine. But I also voted against Richard Nixon in 1968 and twice in 1972, against Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, against George H. W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, and against George W. Bush twice in 2000. I was born a Republican in the South, when we were an insignificant minority. My claim to being a Republican ante-dates the Gipper's and the claims of his Dixiecrat-come-lately fans. I recall a political landscape in which there were polarities, but they were not co-terminus with political parties and the landscape was the healthier for it.
I grew up in a Republican Party which named responsible federal judges in the South on whom the civil rights movement could rely for even-handed judgments and a Republican Party whose support was essential to the passage of major civil rights and environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. I supported California Congressman Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey in his primary challenge to Richard Nixon in 1972. We McCloskey supporters were a tiny minority of Republicans in North Carolina that year, but large enough that Nixon's CREEP machine had moles among us. McCloskey recalls a time when conservatives knew that conservation was a conservative issue and that there is honor in telling the truth about our military operations. I supported Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson's Republican and third party challenge to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980, even serving on his state campaign committee in Delaware. Anderson seemed to represent a viable alternative to the flabby economic and foreign policies of the Carter administration and he warned the country that Ronald Reagan's promises to cut taxes dramatically, vastly expand military expenditures, and balance the federal budget were not compatible. They weren't and he didn't.
Pete McCloskey and John Anderson were the first Republicans in the House of Representatives to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Still, the long shadow of Watergate hangs over my Republican Party. The levers of its power have not gone to the Andersons and McCloskeys who knew that a clear repudiation of its scandal was necessary. Rather, they have fallen to the Reagans and Bushes. While Anderson and McCloskey called for Richard Nixon's impeachment, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush, called for balancing inquiries into Democrats' foibles. As CIA director, he helped to install a brutally repressive regime in Chile. Short of full-throated repudiation of Watergate's scandal, greater reticence about regime changes abroad, and the assertion that integrity matters, the doors were open to trading arms with enemies afar to support insurgents against enemies near at hand, to exposing a CIA intelligence officer as an act of political retribution, and to giving grandiose subsidies to an agent who traded in our own national intelligence. My party is in the hands of people who do not recognize their own betrayal of our national interest and values. There was a time when that would have been unthinkable.
Posted on Monday, June 7, 2004 at 6:42 AM
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/5524.html
So, I'm inclined to agree with you, as much as it galls me to acknowledge it.