Editorial -

Looking Ahead To 2006,
It Is Time For Impeachment

After the three-day failure of George W. Bush to motivate himself and cut short one of his many vacations in order to focus federal attention on the crisis in New Orleans, the Bradley Report stated that he should have faced impeachment charges for his failure to do his duty as president.

And even then, that was overlooking earlier failures, such as his ‘deer in the headlights’ appearance the morning of 9/11, when he continued reading to elementary school children for a protracted period after learning the nation was under attack.

Mr. Bush has failed every time the pressure was on, but he jumps to the fore if a public relations advantage shows itself. He had no trouble cutting a vacation short to fly to Washington to sign legislation cooked up by the GOP Congress that took advantage of the Terri Schiavo tragedy, when a GOP bill designed to prevent the poor woman from being taken off life support needed a presidential signature.

It’s also worth recalling that when G.W. Bush finally decided it was safe enough for him to land after 9/11 and emerge in public, he promised billions in aid to New York City. But as is usually the case with Mr. Bush, the promises were empty; NYC officials had to fight to gain even a portion of the promised funds.

Yet $6 Billion plus is spent each month in Iraq, some many millions of it going to no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other favored administration contractors.

Of course what Mr. Bush and his GOP associates have done in squandering the nation’s wealth makes the Iraq adventure seem small; they turned massive surpluses into ever greater deficits, and coupled those actions with the unheard of policy of reducing tax revenues at the same time a war is being waged and national expenses are skyrocketing.

America is fast becoming the largest debtor nation in the world, with a greater and greater divide between the wealthy and everyone else. Also, if Mr. Bush and his cohorts have their way all the safety nets designed to help average people will disappear for lack of funding. A case can easily be made that Mr. Bush and his GOP allies are purposefully seeking to drain the nation’s wealth, perhaps even expecting to bring the country to the edge of bankruptcy in order to eliminate Social Security, Medicaid and other important programs that help average Americans.

These actions and the suspicions and assumptions that derive from them should be the source of Congressional hearings, since if they are shown to be true they will constitute ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ Congress has held hearings on much less important issues. But today the Congress is dominated by Mr. Bush’s GOP, although a saving grace may yet appear in the fact that the majority of mainstream Republicans may yet step out from domination by the radicals in their party and find their voices.

The fact is, Mr. Bush should be brought forward to an impeachment trial, and the facts included in the following paragraphs illustrate only some of the reasons why that should happen:

- Mr. Bush changed America’s long-standing moral and ethical position of never being an aggressor nation by initiating the ‘so-called’ pre-emptive war against Iraq.

- Mr. Bush and his administration gave Congress and the American people questionable information designed to lead to one conclusion; that is, that Iraq had or was in the process of developing nuclear weapons (Weapons of Mass Destruction). The gentlest comment that can be made regarding this is that George Bush and his administration ‘misled’ the Congress and the American public, but the harsh reality, as more and more evidence reveals, is that the Bush Administration orchestrated a campaign of half-truths and outright lies in order to justify a predetermined attack on Iraq.

- George Bush and his administration repeatedly asserted that Congress had "all the information" when it voted to support the Bush Administration’s attack on Iraq, and used those assertions to attack Democratic Senators and Representatives who have criticized the Iraq war. A recent report by the Congressional Research Service, however, indicates that the Bush Administration had far more information than it provided Congress, and apparently tailored what it provided to the elected Senators and Representatives in order to meet it own agenda.

- Mr. Bush failed to complete the work in Afghanistan, the aggressor country from which the 9/11 murderers plotted their crimes. Where is Osama bin Laden? And what about his network? Terrorists have regrouped and are funded and organized by the Bin Laden organization, with relative impunity, since the Bush Administration left the job half done in order to pursue the Iraq agenda, providing a ‘cause’ for the Islamo-fascists to use for recruitment and giving them an opportunity to regroup, which they have done with considerable success.

- Mr. Bush and his vice president, Richard Cheney, orchestrated an energy policy derived from the wishes of the energy industry, and then stonewalled the General Accounting Office (and everyone else) about who even attended the meetings, in defiance of established norms and legitimate oversight. Ultimately, Congressional leaders browbeat the GAO chief until the issue was sublimated, but it doesn’t take away from the facts for anyone interested in looking! It will not be hard to determine where the Cheney energy policy efforts were directed; i.e., towards making good on contributions from the oil, gas and coal producers by allowing them to set policy, which might well be worth recalling as everyone pays more than $2 for a gallon of gas and fears a heating bill.

- It has just recently come to light that George Bush issued a secret ‘executive order’ in 2002 to have the National Security Agency, NSA, begin to eavesdrop on American citizens as well as foreign nationals. And this was in direct contravention to existing laws. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush clearly believes the president is above the law; the law is for the little people. "This is a different era, a different war…" Mr. Bush stated this week, seeking to justify his dictatorial approach to expanding the power of the presidency. But all wars are different than the ones before them. Pres. Bush’s comment is just more rhetoric aimed at obfuscating the obvious; i.e., Mr. Bush seems to believe in an ‘imperial presidency,’ whereby the views of the president are sacrosanct. The last president who took that stance was Richard M. Nixon. But so far we don’t have kings in America, although the radical GOP is in a much strong position than when Mr. Nixon was president; the Congress is Republican and there is reason to believe the Supreme Court is as well.

- Mr. Bush and his GOP allies have twisted the law in order to do away with Habeas Corpus, thereby allowing prisoners, including American citizens, to be detained indefinitely without trial or charges. Mr. Bush’s political appointees in charge of the ‘Justice Department’ overrode the objections of career justice lawyers and developed arguments favoring indefinite imprisonment that they then used to support this undemocratic system.

- Mr. Bush and his vice president, Richard Cheney, strongly promoted and defended torture techniques never before authorized or even tacitly approved by the United States. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have created and supported policies that are in direct conflict with the protocols of the Geneva Convention, which America worked hard to see come to fruition after the horrors of WWII. The Bush Administration’s policies have brought a great diminishment of American standing and moral authority in the world. And that very point has resulted in Sen. John McCain’s increasingly successful move to develop legislation that will codify what America has always stood for; that is, this is not a nation that uses torture. Unfortunately for the United States, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who never put themselves at risk during the Vietnam War, apparently could not understand the principles involved in refusing to torture prisoners; Mr. McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, has a better understanding of American values.

- Recently Mr. Bush told a Fox Network interviewer that he believes former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is innocent of the felony charges of campaign finance abuse. If Mr. Bush did not realize that by making such comments as President before Mr. DeLay’s trial, and that therefore he was jeopardizing the trial, his ignorance is an indication of how unfit he is for office; but if he in fact understood the consequences, his actions reveal a cynical arrogance that absolutely proves how unfit he is for office. (Mr. DeLay, incidentally, has publicly stated that he is on ‘a mission from God,’ and therefore whatever his actions, they are justifiable since he is answering to a higher authority than the nation’s law. DeLay even declared publicly that the reason he struggled to find some avenue by which to impeach William Jefferson Clinton was because he "is on a mission from God to promote a ‘biblical worldview,’ and that he had pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in part because Mr. Clinton held ‘the wrong worldview.’"*)

- The Bush Administration has been caught paying American columnists and setting up shill reporters even in White House briefings, and recently it’s been shown that the Pentagon, under Bush Administration guidance, has been paying for favorable news stories in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his aides were recently caught setting up a carefully scripted teleconference with American soldiers in Iraq, a teleconference that they were about to pass off to Americans as an open give and take between the president and the soldiers. Anyone who doesn’t perceive that this illustrates deep contempt for a free press and democratic principles ought to go back to civics class.

- Mr. Bush and his GOP political aides fill any public meeting that Pres. Bush attends with carefully vetted, ‘friendly’ citizens; this policy includes the mechanics of how Mr. Bush conducts election campaigns. Again, anyone who somehow thinks this doesn’t tread on American history and principles should go to the library. It is also cowardly. Mr. Bush can only talk to Americans who already agree with his viewpoints. And in a great illustration of gall, that might only be mitigated but not forgiven by ignorance, the well educated but folksy appearing Mr. Bush recently stated that Abraham Lincoln is one of his most cherished historical figures. But trying to align himself with the first president of the Republican Party while at the same time isolating himself from any honest dialogue or give and take with the American electorate is laughable; Mr. Lincoln was one of the greatest stump speakers of all time, and relished the opportunity to speak to his countrymen in any open, give and take forum.

There is much more that could be added to this list, but this is more than enough to illustrate why George W. Bush should be impeached. Mr. Bush isn’t guilty of a tawdry personal affair while in office; he is guilty of damaging the nation internally and externally through calculated policies.

Will he be impeached? It is very unlikely, since the Republicans have so far succeeded in making America a one-party nation.

* The Great Unraveling, by Paul Krugman, Page 274.