Letters to the Editor
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Restoring Respect for the US
There is an important reason for dealing with Bush’s crimes that haven’t been mentioned yet. And that is the necessity for us to bring Bush to justice in order to restore credibility and respect for the US in the world.
There is a huge disconnect between the way the war is and was perceived in the US versus the rest of the world. The US public is only beginning to understand the magnitude of this travesty and the lies that led us into it – something that has been clear to the majority of intelligent, informed people on the planet for years. The public in the rest of the world, with the possible exception of Great Britain, were given the straight facts about the war, unfiltered by a compliant, sycophantic media. They knew from the beginning that Cheney was lying about connections between Al Qaeda and Sadam and it was obvious to them that there were no weapons of mass destruction within months of the invasion, not years later. And they don’t get the sugar coated coverage of Iraq’s destruction that’s fit for US television. They get the full Monty close ups of bloody body parts loaded on the backs of pick-up trucks, and rivers of blood streaming down the streets on a daily basis. They don’t have Rush Limbaugh and Fox news lying them into believing what they would really like to believe – we’re still the good guys, it’s really not so bad in Iraq, we’re all better off without Sadam, and everything will be just peachy in the end as long as we don’t give in to the surrender monkeys.
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betfiske
No, you have your history wrong. Remember, in Florida Al Gore asked for recounts only in four Democratic counties where he had already won!
It was a Democratic strategist who issued a memo on how disallow overseas absentee ballots, which tend to be military and Republican.
It was the Democrats who sued to suppress every single vote in Seminole Country (which voted Republican) because a Republican worker helped people fill out the application for an absentee ballot because a printer's error left some information off. (Note, it was the application for the ballot, not the ballot itself.) They'd throw out every single vote in a Republican county because of this. So much for "let every vote count."
It was the Democrat-dominated Florida Supreme Court that jumped into the case unasked by either side, an act that earned it a 7-2 smackdown from the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as well as the AFL_CIO who bussed their mobs to Florida to create trouble.
No, it was the Dems who tried to steal the votes in FLorida. No matter how many times you silly libs lie about it, the facts are out there.
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Bush won't be impeached
because powerful Senators named Clinton and Obama want to be president. It's useless to take Bush down without Cheney, and after they're both gone, we'd have popular Nancy Pelosi in the White House, running for election as the first female incumbent. No history for Hillary. Obama might be content to bide his time -- I think he should -- but Clinton wants it NOW.
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Impeachment would mean impeaching ourselves.
As one who opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning, I am not at all surprised that we are not strongly supporting impeachment. We bought the "reality" that Bush and his minions created for us. When that "reality" proved to be false, we felt both betrayed and guilty at the same time. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "The fault lies not within the White House, dear Brutus, but within ourselves." We (the American people) share complicity with our President.
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Why?
Because he hasn't done anything to justify it. Congress has gone hand in hand with him through the whole of 9/11 and Iraq (and still are by not pulling funding). He didn't lie to anyone about why we went there and if he did then dems were complicit in the act.
The firings of the attorneys hasn't been proven to be anything more than bad management.
The NSA wiretapping is arguably within the powers he has as CIC.
Unlike Clinton, Bush has worked at his job and taken it seriously while going through the greatest attack on US soil and deposing a dictator.
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Nice article, but...
""This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment. "
I don't consider myself as part of this problem. The guy (and his cohorts) should be promptly impeached. I think the nation will survive an impeachment. It makes a loud statement to the world that our "democracy" works.
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Absolute Impeachment Protection
I can't really buy the premise of this article. I feel nothing for Bush but contempt. Sadly, the only thing he's done that earns my grudging repsect is having selected an even worse, even less popular, purely evil demon for his Vice President. What sane person would even consider impeaching Bush and thereby putting Cheney in the Oval Office?
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Team Bush/Cheney can wait for international war crimes trials ... or at least until Gonzo/Fredo is gone gone gone ...
Personally, I "don't want to know" how this supreme court would come down even in **just** dealing with Fredo ... and I fear creating a lot of case law/precedents to be regretted at leisure...
"Locking the barn door after the horse in gone," comes to mind.
whodathunkit?
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What is the big deal about Cheney?
Cheney is de facto President anyway. Impeaching and convicting Bush would have the salutary effect of forcing the cockroach out into the light, and any Congress with the gonads to send Bush packing would have no trouble reining Cheney in through one veto override after another. Were Cheney to react by pulling the same anti-constitutional stunts as Bush, he'd be out the door as well, since (as another reader pointed out), Cheney lacks any of Bush's protective charm coating.
This is all fantasizing, however. Short of a MAJOR scandal erupting that forces Congress' hand (e.g. Bush caught cheating on Laura with Condi), impeachment isn't going to happen in the next 600-plus days.
But Congress doesn't have to impeach Bush to take back the Constitution. It's high time our representatives fulfilled their 2006 mandate and EXERCISE CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT! It's encouraging to see Judiciary going after Gonzalez, but where are the hearings exposing Iraq military blunders, transitional government corruption, and war profiteering (all of which are well-documented)? Where are the Katrina/FEMA hearings, to remind people how this adminstration left a major American city to die because the population was mostly poor, black, and Democratic?
Oversight is what a lot of us voted for last November. It's the only thing that can get Congress out of wimp mode and show Americans where the moral high ground lies. Reid and Pelosi, are you listening?