Letters to the Editor
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The Symptom or the Cause?
Gary,
A masterful chronicle of the "Assault on Reason" that has occurred during the Bush Administration; especially the voting public's apparent willingness to accept shifting and inconsistent explanations for policy decisions. However, while the Bush Administration has certainly exploited this trend I am not sure to say it fair that they were the principal cause of it. The 'dumbing down' of the electorate began in earnest in the 1980s when Rupert Murdock began to consolidate his media empire. Murdoch's modus operandi had long been to create patriotic myths to serve the interest of (primarily conservative) ruling parties or administrations. The fact that the viewers of a single television network, Fox Channel, have a significantly different view of recent history than the general population is rather astounding.
Seondly, you argue that the public is loathe to impeach President Bush for his deceptions because it held similar views regarding the importance of delivering an object lesson to the Arab world.
No doubt a lot of people are experiencing cognitive dissonance and are reluctant to admit how wrong they were about Iraq and Mr. Bush.
However, I suspect the real reason is more disturbing. A social psychologist friend of mine used to remark that many, if not most of people's opinions, were hard-wired: they had become integral parts of the person's psyche and were virtually unchangeable. It seems that for the approximately 25% of the voting population which still enthusiastically supports Mr. Bush, their opinions have become hard-wired. They support him regardless of his actions or the ensuing consequences. To be fair, there is probably a similar percentage of people on the left who are hard-wired against Mr. Bush (myself included)and suspect his every move.
With these super-polarized groups at the political extremes and a comparatively apathetic majority in the middle, a groundswell of sentiment for a traumatic impeachment proceeding is virtually impossible.
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I'm BEYOND ready to deal with it.
IMPEACH THE BASTARD!!!!
I have never seen any particular virture in patriotism. I would just shrug if somebody accused me of being unpatriotic.
I honestly can't believe I'm reading this article in Salon.
The only reason why the chimperor hasn't been impeached is because Congress is full of craven cowards, dems and repugs alike.
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Impeachment
I cast a vote for impeachment, herewith. Our Congress needs to do its job. Stop funds for the war; revoke the Military Commisions Act; enforce warranted FISA surveillance. Congress needs to do its job by first putting aside the excessive amount of political reasoning behind its lack of decisive action. Then do the job the Founders intended that Congress do.....highplainsjoker
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Gary's "we" and "us" are dishonest
Gary Kamiya doesn't think "we" are reluctant to disown Bush. He doesn't think it's a problem with "us," the American people as a whole. That's the rhetorical pose he keeps striking (in his other recent writing as well), but the people he's really criticizing are THEY and THEM, the people who support Bush -- or who acquiesce in the present circumstances, even if they know he's a bad president. Why are "we" so loath to say what "we" really mean here, Gary?
The problem with the "we"/"us" pose is that is tends to turn the analysis to psychobabble and to exclude certain compelling answers to the question posed. For instance, one reason public opinion isn't stronger for impeachment is that the economy hasn't tanked lately, and the "bottom line" measure of presidents' success is still economic performance. (Nixon was near-impeached AFTER the Arab oil embargo and the long gas lines -- not that those were the reasons, but the background conditions affect how the immediate reasons are perceived.) Second, what would impeachment lead to? A Cheney presidency? To accomplish anything you're talking about a DUAL impeachment, something never even contemplated before. (Again, the Nixon case was different because Spiro Agnew, by happy coincidence, got caught taking bribes and was forced out shortly before the the "Saturday Night Massacre" and the big impeachment push against Nixon got going.)
Third, there's a major problem with the U.S. Constitution -- well, several, but let's stick to this one for a moment. The Constitution was written at the wrong point in history, before the invention of the modern, mass- and party-based democracy. It mimicked a certain idealized notion of British governance from a time which even the British no longer look to for guidance. (The British system was massively reformed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, much more so than the U.S. system modeled on it has ever been. For a good historical account of all this, see Daniel Lazere, "The Frozen Constitution.") In a modern democracy, failed executives and party leaders are replaced, usually at their own party's behest. But the impeachment provisions have come to mean, in practice, that nothing a president does policy-wise, no matter how awful, can get him booted from office, especially when the economic growth rate is positive. The only grounds appear to be self-dealing of some kind tied to garden-variety crimes, like protecting burglars who broke into opposition party headquarters to do your dirty work (or lying in a civil lawsuit, bogus as that charge was). Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove have done a million bad things, but they've either been in pursuit of policy goals or, where they've served narrow GOP interests, they've been -- as far as we know to this point -- examples of heavily "gaming the system" (like firing or pressuring US attorneys) rather than "black-bag jobs," "hush-money payments" or other such explicit, Watergate-style crimes. Such is the perversity of our present constitutional arrangements that the very size, boldness and dangerousness of their misdeeds actually help protect them against impeachment.
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Dude, where's my country?
For me, this article hits closest to the truth when Kamiya mentions our “loss of respect for law, logic and memory, the bland acceptance of spin and lies.” However, the American malaise – which, alas, is rapidly taking hold on an international scale – runs deeper than that. It’s not just a loss of respect for logic and memory, it’s an active contempt for reflectivity of any kind. It’s not just a bland acceptance of spin and lies, it’s a bland acceptance of anything beyond our trivial entertainments, to which we respond blandly. We are, insulated by technology and bamboozled by corporations, a nation of zombies, too numb and dumb to feel even the eye-for-an-eye bloodlust that’s so six years ago. Indignation? Yo, what’s that? How are we to experience something most of us can’t pronounce? We’ve long since become a nation of fiddling Neros, except we lack, in spades, the nobility and can’t even play the damned thing, because, y’know, it’s boring and shit. And I doubt very seriously things will improve. We continue to upgrade the means of communication, and the means of bettering ourselves that would theoretically go with it, but that translates into text messages that more often that not read: “Whereyouat?” Well, our leader is bankrupting us in a war we didn’t have to have, and I’m working twelve-hour days to keep a roof over my head, and I've got what I think could be TB and no insurance to learn for sure. Whereyouat?
Crickets.