Letters to the Editor
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He won't be impeached
Because he did all of those shitty things and people voted for him again anyway. Impeachment would be like cutting off an arm or a leg. All those who voted for him in 2004 are just as complicit in this and they don't want to admit it.
That and sex sells SOOOO much better.
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The Hinterlands are full of Bush Cultists
The Bush support network is a twisted cult.
But having sa Anid that, a sizeable minority would follow him down the rathole. I've lived in Chicago, Little Rock, and Central Illinois over the past six years, and it's clear that people in cities have NO IDEA what people in the hinterlands think.
The aparatus that has directed the people outside cities to vote for Bush can't admit to their culpability. They're not voting for Bush, they're voting against cities. And the electoral college supports that. Come on, we've known about this quirk of American democracy for 200+ years...
Make it easy for the hinterlands to reject him, and it will carry over.
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Re: What are Bush's secret tapes?
Try the Downing Street memo, or the 1998 PNAC report. There are plenty of options here. The problem is the public attitude towards impeachment, created and fed by the press. Remember Ford's funeral? Did you ever stop to wonder why trying a president who had obviously committed a crime would be a 'national tragedy' or some other 'emotional' garbage? In my view, those are code words for the fact that the American public had already reached the limit of their attention span, and were aghast at the possibility of having to follow a major event like that in the news for an extended period of time rather than watching Shaft, or whatever the hell people watched back then. Similarly, impeachment proceedings now could potentially interrupt the American Idol finale.
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The failure lies in not choosing
To impeach Bush would be to do irreparable harm to the American psyche, but to fail to impeach Bush would be to do irreparable harm to the American republic. At first glance, it appears to be a "Sophie's choice", but on closer examination, there is an undeniably correct choice.
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War culture
Mr. Kamiya hits all the right points.
I'd like to highlight one of these points, however.
I always harken back to the Firesign Theatre's Don't Crush that Dwarf.... In that 33rpm recording, they capture the eternal war mentality of post-war America. People routinely chowed down the contradictions in our orders and idealisms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And part of what makes the album timeless is that we can see it's still true. Gary points to this, but it bears being stressed: Americans, in fact, don't really think war is a big deal. It's a crying shame, and difficult to imagine the circumstances under which we'll see the necessary changes come about.
As a far east asian tribe's sarcastic aphorism put it:
Other people's sons don't die out:
http://www.ronazajac.com/Wallpaper/Bie_Ren.png
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It's Treason: Put the Guy on Trial
Impeachment doesn't make sense: the votes aren't there in the Senate.
A criminal indictment for treason, hoiwever, seems to me the way to go. That way he can be tried after the end of his term, and tried by a jury of his peers, with no bunch of Rovepublicans to run interference.
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Been there done that
I was surprised to read that nobody stated the obvious: Bush was impeached in November last year and it didn't do any good then.
When a person as tone deaf as this man is, you can impeach him all you want and it won't make a diff.
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Anything for revenge. Except being shown as incompetent and losers...
Yes, we've allowed Mr Bush to do a lot in our name to exact revenge on someone, anyone, for 9/11.
But Katrina showed, day after day, the incompetence at the rotten core of this White House. Americans are not incompetent. But day after day, it certainly seemed like we were, and it was live, and in color. How dare he allow this to be shown to the world!
And now we're about to lose a war. Of course, it was lost the first day of looting, when Rumsfeld explained that "this is democracy and it's a little messy" or some such. Eisenhower and Marshall were surely rolling in their graves.
Or maybe it was lost the day the 380,000 TONS of high explosives went missing from a munitions depot, left unguarded by an undermanned army. Those explosives are now blowing us up, day after day.
Or maybe it was lost when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Perle and Cheney decided that 200,000 troops was just fine, when all the experts said that 500,000 was probably more appropriate.
It certainly was lost if Iraq were truly "the central front in the war on terror", "an existential war." Show up with 200,000 troops to an existential war?? Eisenhower and Marshall turn one more time in their graves.
So, it's lost. It's lost because it was based on a lie. It's lost because strategically it was a very stupid thing to do, with very little upside and a whole lot of potential downside. It's lost because Bush decided to get Iraq in January 2001, whatever the reason and whatever the cost. "Bring 'em on!"
But Americans don't like to lose. And we don't like to be shown as incompetent. So the mob will turn on this chickenshit coward some day and rend him to pieces.
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At this point, it's a practical matter.
Sadly, with Cheney having to be first (what sane human would wish for his ascendance?) and there being until November of next year, January '09 at the outside, there simply isn't time to hold hearings, vote a bill of impeachment, and conduct the trial.
What should happen is that in January 2009, once Bush is no longer president, he would be seized by federal marshals (on his leaving the inauguration would be a nice touch) and bound over to The Hague for trial on war crimes charges. And Cheney needs to be sent there as well.
I hear Milosevic's cell is available.
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It's called cognitive dissonance.
I think we've come a long way from Bush taking the oath of office for the second time in 2005 considering how many people bought the lemon. The ride is sloppy, it's starting to rust-out, it gets terrible gas mileage and the doors swing open randomly. People admit it. But it would take some kind of circus spectacle to impeach him.