Letters to the Editor
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Re: impeachment and "President Pelosi"
I don't think it is necessary to assume a "President Pelosi" is why there are no impeachment proceedings. Such proceedings would be very slow, and would allow time for a replacement VP to be appointed by whoever happens to be president.
I doubt Sens. Clinton and Obama are opposed to impeachment on the grounds of being overshadowed. The whole "Speaker as third in line" was in the event of POTUS and VPOTUS being killed simultaneously.
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The end of Democracy?
Sadly, it appears to be the case. Clinton was impeached for an act commited that is far less severe than that of Buschco.
How many more lives will be lost? How much more treasure has to be be looted? What will be left of our constitution by January, 2009?
Too bad all of us are going to find out. By that time, our country may not be recognizable, and may not be salvagable by any new administration.
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It's all too much
Another only slightly facetious suggestion for why Bush isn't being impeached is that it's so hard to know where to start. He's done SO much that's wrong in so many ways. Finding a quorum of congresspersons who can agree on WHICH crime to prosecute could be a challenge. I say let's pick one and start hammering it. Bush's claim that no wiretaps happen without a warrant, especially now that we have Comey's testimony, is clearcut crime, a much bigger lie than Bill Clinton ever dreamed of trying to put across, ample grounds for impeachment. Keep it clean, don't brin in the war or the DOJ tampering or anything else. Impeach!
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This has needed to be said for years
As that old quip said, 'when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.'
While Gore Vidal and a few other brave voices have long touched on such things as Kamiya discusses here, I have not seen them voiced in as popular a forum as Salon before. The American people must face up to their complicity in the state of our union and the crimes and misdeeds committed in their name both within and beyond our borders. The Bush administration is shockingly criminal and un-American yet it gives respectability to so many of the small-minded, weak, and dangerous impulses that make up the American character today.
American citizens didn't need (or particularly want) a real, legal reason to attack Iraq. This nation has harbored violent anger toward the Muslim world since the Iran hostage situation of President Carter's term. I submit that the widespread approval for this war on Iraq is directly descended from that unrelated incident years ago. 9/11 simply made the anger and violence rise to the surface and boil over and seem newly justified.
But so many of Bush's vile tactics, serious misdeeds, and assaults on a civil American society simply reflect the laziest, most inward-looking, and base impulses of our culture. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Thank you, Mr. Kamiya.
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Impeachment would be satisfying
But I'd rather see Bush suffer the death of a thousand cuts.
Bring on the subpoenas!
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Wrong Analogy
A better analogy than a bad marraige would be an evil stepfather. It's much, much harder to get rid of a bad stepfather than a lousy husband.
Kamiya correctly notes that the main reason Bush hasn't been impeached is because of the Democrats, and he also correctly notes that the establishment media have treated "impeachment talk as if it were the unseemly rantings of half-crazed hordes." But then he attributes media's stance to BUYING into the paradigm that Kamiya spends most of his article articulating - "our acceptance of the universality of spin."
This is where his analysis goes very wrong. He fails to distinguish between those who are responsible for spinning the truth (the White House, the right-wing, mainstream media, and the rest of the political leadership) and those who are the recipients of that spin (the public).
When Kamiya cites, for example, the senior WH spokesman who told Ron Suskind that the WH was a proud member of the "faith-based community" he treats this as a statement about the whole American psyche. In fact the WH spokesman was referring to the WH alone and was DERIDING Suskind and others for being members of the "reality-based community." Similarly, when Kamiya seeks to support his contention that 9/11 created a "John Wayne" moment among all Americans, he cites Kissinger and Friedman, neither of whom can be said to be representative of the American public as a whole.
The American public HAD TO BE LIED TO in order to justify our illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. There's no way anyone would have gone along with it absent those lies. The notion that Saddham was responsible for 9/11 isn't something that emerged somehow from the public. The people were not overall engaging in mass, self-deception.
It is not the American people who are strangely disconnected. A majority for some time have been saying they support impeachment (e.g., the 10/06 Newsweek poll showing 51% wanting impeachment). Indeed, they voted powerfully against the war in 11/06 and before that a majority voted against Bush/Cheney in 11/04 (except that the election was stolen AGAIN - see my analysis of this in Chap. 2 of "Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney," ed. by Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips).
The problem is that the people cannot act to change public policy or accomplish impeachment without political leadership advancing their sentiments. The media, by treating impeachment as verboten, and the Democratic Party, in doing the same, have effectively blocked what the majority of Americans want - the impeachment and conviction of Bush and Cheney. If the NY Times or John Kerry were to come out for impeachment tomorrow, would anybody be wondering why the American people have allowed these reactionaries in the WH to remain? Of course not, because the outpouring of public sentiment in support of impeachment would be immense.
What Kamiya treats as a mass, psychological state of mind among Americans is more properly seen as a fraud perpetrated upon the public by opinion-leaders. David Brock in "The Republican Noise Machine" traces the historical development of this egregious state of affairs. We further analyze this phenomenon in "Impeach the President" - our authors including Howard Zinn, Mark Crispin Miller, Greg Palast and many others.
As I wrote in the Preface to ITP:
"The central problem here is that truth and facts have been barricaded off from reaching most of the American people. If Americans truly knew exactly what was going on in their names, they would mass outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, scale the gates, haul these perpetrators out of the White House by their shirt collars and put them on trial immediately for crimes against humanity. This has yet to happen because the right wing has been resoundingly successful in the plans it laid beginning in the early 1970s to dramatically alter the political landscape. Through the very deep pockets of people like Rupert Murdoch, Adolph Coors and the 'Four Sisters,' they have invested tens of billions of dollars in establishing their own media empire such as Fox News and Clear Channel, their own think tanks, publishing houses, their heavy subsidy and cultivation of right wing scholars and writers, and so on. From these pulpits they have bullied, lied and twisted. Their media empire’s impact cannot be overestimated. They have cowed the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. Like the shadow cast by the immense alien ship in the movie Independence Day, Bush/Cheney and the radical right have generated a black cloud over this country. We wrote this book to help to dispel this.
"These times call for nothing less than that the people take extraordinary measures to repudiate these 'leaders.' An unprecedented mass popular upheaval is what must occur."