Why Removal of Bush and Cheney from Office Needs to Be Done Soon

Time for change

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Sun Jul-22-07 09:39 PM
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Why Removal of Bush and Cheney from Office Needs to Be Done Soon

Edited on Sun Jul-22-07 09:47 PM by Time for change

Many DUers (and other Americans as well) have expressed increasing levels of concern in recent days and weeks that Bush and Cheney intend at some point to strip away the remaining façade and turn our nation from a virtual dictatorship into an actual dictatorship, which they would preside over after cancelling the 2008 elections.

There are many good reasons for this fear in my opinion. Since entering office they have both shown nothing but contempt for domestic and international law and for our Constitution.

With George Bush’s hundreds of “signing statements” he has made clear that he, as the supreme “decider” of our nation, has no obligation to defer to Congress’s authority to enact the laws of our nation.

His secret plans for continuance of government in the event of a terrorist attack, given that only the executive branch of our government is privy to those plans, clearly violates the separation of powers at the heart of our constitutional system of government. Just how secret these plans are were demonstrated recently when Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio requested and was denied access to the plans, though he is a member of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee.

His obstructing of Congressional investigations into his many crimes and impeachable offenses by refusing to comply with subpoenas, ordering witnesses not to appear before Congress, and then ordering his Justice Department not to pursue contempt charges, further emphasizes his claim of absolute immunity from all the laws of our nation.

Last year The Nation published an article – a semi-spoof – about Bush cancelling the 2008 elections. I refer to this article as a semi-spoof, rather than as a spoof, because The Nation is a very serious publication. They have never done a spoof that I am aware of.

Nobody knows where this will end, but many have been wondering why the Bush-Cheney administration would go to such trouble to destroy the Constitutional basis for the rule of law in our nation if they were planning on giving up power following the 2008 elections. It is a question well worth wondering about.

Why we may be running out of time

Milton Mayer, who studied the thinking of ordinary lower level Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power, explained in his book, “They Thought They Were Free – The Germans 1933-45”, the gradual process by which Germans gave up their freedom to Hitler:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

Hitler’s takeover of Europe provides a similar case in point. When France allowed Germany to break its treaty obligations and occupy the Rhineland in 1936, they thereby allowed him to acquire an incalculable military advantage, without which he could never have attacked them. His defeat in 1936 was a near certainty if France had called his bluff. Again in 1938, he was appeased when he was given the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in response to his threat to invade that country.

The lesson from this is clear. The longer we wait the more power Bush and Cheney will accumulate, and the more difficult it will be to dislodge them. If Congress moves to impeach them now, it is very possible that they will attempt a coup de tat. However, if that happens you can be sure that the impeachment effort will have changed only the timing of the coup de tat, not its occurrence. And furthermore, by so changing timing, Congress will also have reduced its likelihood of success, by moving it forward to a point in time when the tyrants would probably be less prepared.

There is no appeasing a Hitler. Nor is it possible to appease a George W. Bush or a Dick Cheney. Anyone who doesn’t see that either is not paying very close attention or is in denial.

Can it happen here?

To those who say that Americans are immune to the tragedy that overtook Germany in the 1930s I say, I hope you’re right, but I see little evidence of it. Consider some parallels:

With both regimes a terrorist event (The Reichstag fire in the case of Germany) provided an excuse to the prevailing regime for extensive suspension of civil liberties guaranteed by their respective constitutions.

Both Bush and Hitler knowingly lied to their own people and to the outside world to justify an invasion of another country that posed no threat to their country – invasions that both leaders had desired for years.

Both regimes exercised a considerable degree of effective control over the primary sources of news in their respective countries.

Hitler used blatant racism to justify and facilitate his consolidation of powers in Germany. Though less obvious, George Bush’s use of “Islamist fundamentalism” to invoke fear in American citizens is undoubtedly a powerful tool for his consolidation of power. The acceptance by many Americans of George Bush’s imprisoning and torture of thousands of Muslims, while allowing them no access to internationally recognized human rights to challenge their detentions, is undoubtedly facilitated by racist attitudes.

Both regimes made it quite clear that they would not be swayed in the slightest bit by world opinion where their own perceived interests were at stake.

Both regimes treated their political opponents ruthlessly – probably as ruthlessly as the realities of the situation would permit.

In the case of both Hitler and Bush, the threat of a de-stabilized republic contributed to pressure to appoint them Chancellor and President respectively, and in both cases the threat of violence was an important factor in leading to their ascension to power.

Consider the impeachment of Richard Nixon

I recently posted an article on DU that described many impeachable offenses committed by Bush/Cheney, for which abundant evidence already exists. One thing I didn’t do in that post was to make comparisons with the impeachment of Richard Nixon. I’ll make those comparisons here as a straight-forward answer to anyone who thinks that the offenses committed by Bush and Cheney don’t rise to the level of impeachable offenses:

Article I – Obstruction of justice
The first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved several actions that he took to cover up his involvement in the Watergate break-in.

The Bush/Cheney administration has gone way beyond obstruction of justice with respect to one specific crime. In comparison, they have made a full scale attempt to pervert the whole Justice Department, by firing attorneys who refuse to comply with their political agenda and replacing them with obsequious sheep.

Article II – Violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens
The Constitutional rights involved in this article of impeachment against Richard Nixon pertained almost wholly to his spying on American citizens.

By contrast, the Bush/Cheney administration has repeatedly violated several of our Constitutional rights:

George Bush has denied us our First Amendment rights in numerous ways: He denies the right of protesters to be heard by confining the right of protest to “first amendment zones”. He denies government access to journalists who fail to tow his line. He ties up our airways, using tax dollars, with government propagandists pretending to be real journalists. And he has even claimed the right to imprison journalists who expose administration crimes to the public.

George Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program is a clear example of massive and repeated violations of our Fourth Amendment rights. Though Bush has repeatedly assured Americans that the program’s purpose is to “catch terrorists”, he has offered no evidence to that effect. If the Bush administration’s wiretapping of American citizens had a justifiable basis behind it, there should be no reason it couldn’t request warrants to conduct them. Though Bush claims that that would hamper his “War on Terror”, that claim is patently absurd, since the law allows the requesting of warrants to be retroactive. Furthermore, knowledgeable sources have maintained that, though thousands of warrantless wiretaps per year have been ordered and conducted by the Bush administration, fewer than ten per year are justified by the constitutional standard of “reasonable cause” for suspicion.

In its so-called “War on Terror”, the Bush administration has violated virtually every provision of our Fifth and Sixth Amendments. It is barely an exaggeration to say that our detainees in this so-called war have no rights whatsoever. They are held indefinitely, and only a minute fraction of them have charges brought against them. They are not allowed to confront witnesses against them. They are not given access to counsel. According to our own military, most of them are completely innocent. The whole idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is turned inside out by our administration’s repeated public pronouncements on their guilt.

There is abundant evidence that torture of our detainees is widespread and routine, as documented by Human Rights Watch, Seymour Hersh, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and our own FBI. Furthermore, the Bush administration has issued memos affirming its right to torture our prisoners, and George Bush himself has appended a “signing statement” to an anti-torture bill passed by Congress.

Article III – Failure to comply with Congressional subpoenas
I’ve already discussed this issue in the initial portion of this post. Suffice it to say that Bush and Cheney’s refusal to comply with Congressional subpoenas has been flagrant, repeated, without any justifiable excuse, and hardly requires any “investigation” to substantiate.

I think we’ve run out of alternative options

George Bush and Dick Cheney have determined that they have the right to exempt themselves from any law as long as they CLAIM that they are doing it to protect American citizens during wartime. Since our current “War on Terrorism” is not likely to end any time in the foreseeable future, that means that Bush and Cheney have claimed this right for an indefinite period of time.

If they can unilaterally abolish our constitutional rights; if they can assert no accountability whatsoever to Congressional oversight; if they can assert the power to perform the functions of the legislative and judiciary branches of our government; in short, if they can assert that they are totally immune to the rule of law, international and domestic, then what is to prevent them from unilaterally declaring martial law, cancelling the 2008 elections, throwing dissidents into prison (probably to be tortured), and ruling our country with an iron fist for many years to come?

They’ve already shown themselves impervious to any other attempt to reign them in. What tools do we have left other than their impeachment and removal from office?

PS – Don’t forget David Swanson’s recent post, noting that John Conyers has promised to start impeachment hearings if he can find three more Congresspersons to support it. He ends his post by telling us about the impeachment march at Arlington National Cemetery tomorrow (or today, depending on when you’re reading this), Monday, July 23rd, and saying:

Not everyone will be able to take part. But everyone can take two minutes on Monday and do two things: phone Chairman Conyers at 202-225-5126 and ask him to start the impeachment of dick Cheney; and phone your own Congress Member at 202-224-3121 and ask them to immediately call Conyers' office to express their support for impeachment. Your Congress Member might just be one of the three needed, not just to keep us out of jail but to keep this nation from devolving into dictatorship.