Dave Lindorff: Feingold Turns to Dross

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8757

Feingold Turns to Dross
by Dave Lindorff | Jul 17 2007

In a diary entry on DailyKos, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), one of the most consistently progressive liberals in the Senate, surrendered to the Democratic Party Establishment, with an embarrassing string of lame and tired excuses for not standing for impeachment of the Bush/Cheney regime.

Feingold, who once took the lead in opposing Bush's and Cheney's abuses of power and their undermining of the Constitution with a censure motion filed in the Senate, wrote in the DailyKos diary that while he agreed that Bush and Cheney "may well have" committed "impeachable offenses," he nonetheless did not support impeachment.

His reasons offered for this bizarre turnabout sounded suspiciously like "talking points" from the Democratic Leadership Council, or from the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Feingold says he worries about "The great deal of time multiple impeachment trials would take away from the Congress working on the problems of the country." But he fails to address what problems Congress is actually working on, or what problems it can even try to work on. The list is embarrassingly short. In fact, aside from the tiny and almost meaningless increase in the federal minimum wage that was passed as kind of "blood money" attached to the $120-billion Iraq War funding bill, there is nothing Congress has done in the last six months. And there is nothing they can do, because Bush can veto anything significant that the Democrats manage to pass, and even if he can't veto a bill, he can kill it with a signing statement, unless Congress impeaches him for his refusal to enact laws.

Feingold says "the time it would take for the House to consider articles of impeachment, and for the Senate to conduct multiple trials would make it very difficult, if not impossible, for Congress to do what it was elected to do - end the war and address some of the other terrible mistakes this Administration has made over the past six and a half years." Hey Russ! Wasn't Congress also elected by Americans who wanted to restore respect for the Bill of Rights and the rule of law? Also, remember that the whole Clinton impeachment process took all of four months--not a particularly long time. And again, without impeachment "on the table," Congress has done nothing to end the war in over six months, and it has not been able to do anything about addressing those "terrible mistakes" of the Bush administration.

Mistakes? We're talking about crimes here; not mistakes!

more...

[frazzled]

1. You love him, you hate him

Yes, Feingold is one of the most progressive. When he says or does soething you like, he's a hero. When he says something you disagree with, he's "dross." All in the course of a day. And The Smirking Chimp is the arbiter.

This is such utter bullshit. Russ Feingold has never had a problem with standing up to the "Democratic establishment," whatever that is. Get it through your skulls that this is something he actually BELIEVES. It is his reasoned opinion. Disagree with him if you wish--that is our enlightened way of hammering out issues in our society--but don't claim he is some puppet of the establishment. Don't create heroes and villains on a case-by-case basis of the same individual.

You are not Robespierre sitting on the Committe on Public Safety, passing sentence on ertwhile dedicated revolutionaries who have strayed from the righteous path through some utterance or association or another. Not an example of the kind of judgment that leads to more enlightened results.

[AndyA]

2. It sounds like Feingold has fallen into the GOP's trap.

They want to make it look like the Dems didn't do anything this year. They're stalling, blocking, filibustering, whatever they can do to create talking points for the 2008 elections.

"The Dems, the majority, did little to nothing with the time they've been given by the American people...no good legislation has come of the 110th Congress..."

Impeachment needs to be the focus, nothing else is going to get through anyway. Bush will veto anything and everything not to his liking, and the GOP is going to do their thing until the very last minute before the elections, hoping Americans have a short attention span and memory.

Which is why impeachment is the best thing right now, the votes will happen right before the 2008 elections, and at that point who the hell wants to be on record as supporting Bush/Cheney, who will no doubt be polling in the mid-teens by then?

[Demeter]

3. Sounds Like the Man Was Threatened

a government by threat--really makes one proud to be an American. MADness--Mutual Assured Destruction, forcing stalemate and continuation of the problems, instead of change.