Impeach?

Certainly, the lying bastard in the White House deserves to be impeached. He lied to the country about his tax cuts, his medicare plan, and his education programs. He lied about a million things, big and small. Occasionally, I make an offer to right wingers on Usenet: for every lie Clinton told, I will come up with twenty that Putsch has told. I’ve only had one taker in the three years or so that I’ve made that offer, and he gave up after one round.

Certainly, Putsch has been flat-out contemptuous of the American people, toadying to corporate interests, imposing lies and fabrications on scientific documents. He had a whore from the American Petroleum Institute editing copy on scientific reports on global warming, and just today it emerged that he had someone doctor BLM reports on the effects of overgrazing.

He is so arrogant in his utter wastrel corruption that he doesn’t even bother to conceal the corruption, openly charging thousands of dollars for the “privilege” of meeting with him, which ensures that only representatives from large corporations and well-heeled special interest groups will have that opportunity. Nor does he care what his corruption does to America: the day after both he and Cheney insisted that the facility at Guantanamo, source of utter disgrace to the reputation of the American military, must remain open “because bad people are in there” (I -guess- Cheney meant the inmates and not the guards), it came out that Cheney’s Haliburton had just landed a $30 million contract to build a whole new prison facility at Gitmo.

And of course, Putsch lied about Iraq. Even as he was mooing to the American people that if Saddam would only comply with demands, we would all be spared the horror of having to use force, he already had plans in place firmly to attack, no matter what Saddam did or didn’t do. Maybe he was hoping that claims from the various intelligence agencies and the UN that Saddam was in compliance would turn out to be incorrect, or perhaps he was hoping to sneak some WMDs into Iraq and was unable to, but in any case, he was left with an embarrassing void where the justification for war was supposed to be.

All the warnings about how winning the war would be easy but winning the peace nearly impossible fell on the deaf ears of glory-struck chickenhawks – Putsch and the neo-cons – who belatedly wanted to win some medals to pin on their narrow white chests, having passed on the opportunity in Vietnam.

And so now we are hearing noises about impeachment. If the sleazy, corrupt crowd of Republicans that infest the House under the tutelage of Tom “Bug Spray” DeLay treated Putsch the way they treated Clinton, they would have impeached him a dozen times over by now. (One of the Weasels remarked that in the eyes of the right wingers, Clinton was a far worse murderer than Putsch, because while Putsch has only caused the deaths of 100,000 souls, Clinton killed millions of souls, leaving them to dry on the label of Monica Lewinsky’s dress).

You’ll hear talk of impeachment, and you’ll hear a lot of excellent reasons for an impeachment, but don’t hold your breath. It isn’t going to happen any time soon.

For one thing, the House, the only entity that can impeach a president, is in Republican hands. And these are extremely corrupt hands, hands that place the needs of the party (or more specifically, the party’s benefactors) well ahead of the needs of the people, or even the country. The only way this congress is going to vote to impeach a President who is of their own party is if public hatred of the man becomes so intense that the congresscritters realize that leaving him in office will do them far more harm in November 2006 than the political embarrassment of an impeachment would do. Republicans will remember that even when they did the right thing and forced the resignation of Nixon, they still got kicked around in the elections for the next two cycles. (They aren’t bright enough to realize that they political damage would have been far worse had they continued to stonewall and put the country through the agony of a full impeachment and subsequent trial).

I’m not saying impeachment couldn’t happen: both Putsch and the GOP are plunging in the polls, and they might realize that Iraq and the economy are costing them more votes than they can compensate for by stealing votes in the ballot boxes. But at this stage, it isn’t likely.

And while the House Democrats are finally making some noise, don’t expect them to boldly take the initiative in an impeachment process. Remember that, with a handful of exceptions, this is the lot who sat, quivering and silent, and let Putsch get away with everything. Another of the Weasels remarked of Conyer’s hearings on the Downing Street memo, “This is an old political trick. The politician stays silent for a long time, then speaks up after it is too late to do anything about the problem we're experiencing. They think this will make them look like wise, courageous opponents of some nefarious policy that we also oppose -- and that they will get our progressive votes because they finally uttered some progressive words, too late to fix anything. It's called ‘politics as usual.’ Diane Feinstein does it all the time. So now we have a good group of Democrats who have magically discovered that there's something rotten going on in Washington DC, Iraq, London, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Wall Street, Afghanistan, Detroit, Ohio and California. They finally held a meeting. They finally took a petition WE created, and went on a ‘march.’ I'm sorry, but they get no points from me for coming to the party as late as they have. They are not *my* heroes. They were just doing their jobs, about four years too late.”

You see the problem. The Republicans won’t move until they are certain the battle is lost. The Democrats won’t move until they are certain the battle is won.

Don’t expect much from the mainstream media, either. It took them almost six weeks to start reporting on the Downing Street memo, the minutes of the British Cabinet meeting in which the British discussed Putsch’s plans to “fix the intelligence” around a policy of invasion. Three months before that lying sack of shit promised the country he would try to avoid war, right?

Even now, you have “journalists” like Dana Milbank, of the Washington Whore Post, who was the only reporter for that former newspaper to report on the Conyers hearings, and who did everything in his power to trivialize and denigrate those meetings. (Conyers, to his credit, called Milbank on it, causing him some richly deserved embarrassment). The New York Times’ resident armchair hawk, Thomas L. Friedman has decided that Iraq is lost, and is looking around for someone to blame, in the hopes that nobody will notice he spent the last three years calling for America to rush headlong into the very predicament it is in today. While he acknowledges that perhaps the administration could have been paying a bit more attention to details while falling into that quagmire, the real blame, he feels, lays with Democrats, liberals, and anti-war activists. Apparently we (I’m a liberal and an anti-war activist, in case nobody noticed) were criticizing the war in Iraq just to embarrass our Fearless Leader, and it was this mild sense of embarrassment that caused him to, um, lose.

I would love to get in Friedman’s face and demand to know why, if our only reason for opposing the war was to embarrass Putsch, we spent the six months BEFORE the attack protesting, signing petitions, slogging in rain, sleet and snow, and taking abuse and punishment from the right wingers and hyperpatriots in the community. We did everything in our power, Mr. Friedman, to spare America and the world the catastrophe that you so joyously embraced. I f we wanted to use Iraq to embarrass that clown, why did we oppose going in there beforehand?

Tell you what, Friedman. We can each get copies of those Doonesbury panels that listed all the war dead last month, and put them up on our bedroom walls. Having it there won’t make me any happier than it would you.

But I bet I sleep better.