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Bush and Cheney are a threat to American public safety. Their continued tenure in office means that the failed policy in the war on terror and Iraq will continue. Bush claims to have altered the course in his war against Iraq, but the escalation of the war to which he gives the quaint name the Surge is nothing more than the course on steroids. More lives will be lost and the danger that the war will be expanded to Iran without the consent of Congress of the American people is real.
Bush and Cheney will not listen to reason. The war is their legacy and they will escalate and expand it as a way of locking the nation into war long after they have departed. The only way to stop them is to remove them from office as soon as possible.
The only remedy to the danger to public safety that Bush and Cheney pose is impeachment and removal from office. So just do it, baby.
It is not a question of whether there is enough evidence to charge Bush and Cheney with high crimes and misdemeanors. It has been a given for a long time that Bush, Cheney and their aides have committed impeachable offenses. High crimes and misdemeanors were committed when the first missiles were fired over Baghdad in what was a colonial war with no real justification. It was also in the first hours of the invasion that the extent of Bush's lies became evident: Not only did Saddam not have WMDs in the quantities claimed by the Bush regime, he had none at all. If he had them, he would have used them just as the invasion started, when invading forces were massed in Kuwait, making one big, fat target. It would have been, to use the cliche, just like shooting fish in a barrel. Ironically, it would have been a perfectly legal example of a pre-emptive strike.
The war against Iraq was founded on facts that were either distorted, misrepresented or fabricated. There were no biochemical weapons, attempts to buy yellowcake or any working relationship between al Qaida and the Iraqi regime. Iraq was not a threat to its weakest neighbor. Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector, told any one who would listen prior to the war that there was reason to suppose that Saddam possessed little or nothing in the way of biochemical weapons, but he was ignored. We have had since the war the comments of Karen Kwiatkowski on how the OSP operated in the Pentagon, of Ambassador Joseph Wilson as to how his findings about a specific case in which it was alleged that Saddam attempted to buy yellowcake in Niger were misrepresented in the 2003 State of the Union message and the comments of Tyler Drumheller, former CIA field station chief in Rome, of how the regime systematically used material that would support a case for war, no matter how dubious, and ignore anything that would contradict it. UN inspectors returned to Iraq prior, turned the country upside down and found nothing but a few missiles which, under ideal conditions and with no payload, could fly a little further than allowed; they were destroyed. Yet with more evidence to suggest that Iraq had no biochemical arsenal than to support the charges made by Colin Powell as to how much of this or that biochemical agent Saddam or statements by Donald Rumsfeld as to where they were, Bush went to war.
Bush, Cheney and their aides lied to the American people and knew they were lying.
Add to the willful launching of an unjustified war of aggression, a clear violation of the UN Charter, the violations of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, we have yet more impeachable offenses. Add to that illegal, warrantless surveillance of American citizens and there are more and more reasons to impeach and remove.
But I digress.
In the end, it doesn't matter why Bush and Cheney are impeached and removed. The important thing is to remove the threat to American public safety, constitutional civil liberties and world peace by removing Bush and Cheney from power. Just do it, baby.
There are many other matters for which the regime can be ousted. Bush specifically now appears to have had a role in the firing of eight US Attorneys for the purpose of politicizing the justice department, subverting the constitutional principle of equal protection under the law. Bush may have committed no crime in the sense of violating an overt act of Congress, but explicitly or implicitly directing US Attorneys to go after office holders of one political party, even on trumped up charges, and lay off the other is not something anybody wants any president doing. It is an impeachable offense.
When Mr. Gonzales sits down under oath tomorrow and says he only fired US Attorneys at the direction of Mr. Bush, he will be implicating Mr. Bush in high crimes and misdemeanors. Since US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, Bush broke no law in firing any of them. However, to fire certain US Attorneys and replace them with political hacks in a way to suggest that it is the duty of US Attorneys to prosecute Mr. Bush's political opponents and allow a free reign of vice to his political allies is an abuse of power. The term high crimes and misdemeanors not only applies to violations of statutory law, but to this kind of violation of public trust. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended three articles against President Nixon, soon made moot by Nixon's resignation two weeks later. The second of these articles covered President Nixon's abuse of power. The specifics were matters like setting the IRS and the FBI on political opponents; there is no statute prohibiting the President from doing this sort of thing, but it certainly harms the cause of equal justice under the law when he does. Whether Mr. Bush hatched the whole scheme or not is immaterial. {i]All of the principal actors must be removed from office. Just do it, baby.
As for Mr. Cheney, we have evidence from the trial of Scooter Libby that he was directing the smear campaign against Ambassador Wilson which resulted in the blowing of a CIA counterproliferations officer's cover. I can say that I held an MI MOS in the US Army from 1976 through 1979; part of my job was to handle classified information and part of my training was to learn the proper way to handle it and what consequences there were for not handling it properly. Had I handled classified information with the same reckless abandon that Mr. Cheney and members of the OVP handled the fact of Ms. Plame's employment at the CIA, which was classified, I could have faced a court martial. Mr. Cheney should at the very least face impeachment for his role in the matter.
So should Mr. Bush, who declassified parts of the NIE in a highly irregular way to give Cheney and his crew legal cover to leak it; in effect, Bush declassified secrets but that was a secret to all but three individuals: Bush, Cheney and Libby. Again, Mr. Bush may have had the legal authority to declassify parts of the NIE, but to do so in this way in order to advance not national security but a clandestine political smear campaign against a whistleblower is another example of abuse of power. It is an impeachable offense.
Nailing a cabal of war criminals for acts like that may be a little like nailing Al Capone for income tax evasion. but it did the trick. Capone, who was fatally ill with syphilis, was put in Alcatraz for the rest of his life. It stopped him from killing again. Impeaching Bush and Cheney over matters that seem almost trivial compared to starting a war that has killed hundreds of thousands for reasons based on a pack of lies may not be wholly satisfying, but it will stop them from killing again. So let's just do it, baby.
There should be no doubt that high crimes and misdemeanors were committed and the evidence is there. It won't be hard work for congressional staffers to find it. So just do it, baby.
While Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney should be removed from power as soon as possible, it is for members of the Democratic majority in Congress to determine the time. Approximately a third of Senate Republicans will need to be convinced to vote guilty, even if it means making Nancy Pelosi president.
Impeaching and removing Bush and Cheney is necessary for American public safety. They have stretched our Army and Navy thin and to the breaking point. If the United States had a legitimate and urgent reason to go to war tomorrow, would the military be able to answer the call? They have neglected public works such as levees that make natural disasters that much worse. They have rotted the bureaus of government that do the people's business with corruption and cronyism. All this, and they listen to our phone conversations and do away with the writ of Habeas Corpus, too.
In short, Bush and Cheney should be impeached for any reason and at any time that will assure that a majority of the House will vote to impeach and two-thirds of the Senate will vote to convict. As long as they're gone, that is all that matters.
That is my idea of impeachment. Just do it, baby.
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