Letter to Congress Critters

[Jack Rabbit]

Via the People's E-mail Network (PEN)

I am in favor of impeaching both Bush and Cheney, preferably simultaneously.

Please do not tell me this is divisive. It will be divisive if they remain in office.

Please do not tell me you don't have the votes. This is a fight that must be fought. Courage means fighting those fights that must be fought with no guarantees of the outcome. It's long past time for congressional Democrats and the patriots on the other side of the aisle to stop running from those fights.

And please don't tell me you don't have time. Seventeen months is time enough for Messrs. Bush and Cheney to start an unnecessary war with Iran based on bogus intelligence or a prefabricated provocation. That is something that must be prevented.

Thank you.

[warren pease]

1. Cross post from another thread...

This is in response to one of the "if we can't guarantee a victory, why bother?" folks, who also worries about impeachmentitis, in which all presidents are impeached by the opposition party in a continuing cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. Eventually, no one worth a damn will want the job -- kinda like now, with a couple of notable exceptions. Post follows:


There are at least four really good reasons to impeach Bush and Cheney right now:

1 Simple justice says they must be held accountable for their crimes, and punished to the full extent of the law. If this administration isn't impeachable, what else would they have to do to qualify? Butcher and eat babies on national television? Rape and murder college women on a different campus every week, with full video coverage?

2 Their totalitarian agenda must be exposed so that the American people understand the magnitude of their unprecedented criminality. The closet brownshirts will support BushCo to the end, but the non-insane among us would almost certainly react with disgust and outrage.

3 Somebody has to put a stop to their murderous agenda before they can nuke Iran or shed any more blood in Iraq or Afghanistan. Congress shows no sigh of curtailing funding, so the remaining option is to get rid of the bastards who demanded the money in the first place.

4 They must serve as an example of what will happen to the next right wing cabal if it tries to replace representative democracy with fascism. If they get a pass on the sheer volume of offenses against sanity and the Constitution, what kind of signal does that send to the future fascists of america club?

And then there’s impeachment as the last means of self-defense. It’s getting a bit urgent, and all the pieces are in place to install a pure fascist dictatorship. They're just waiting for an excuse, and they're certainly not above manufacturing their own.

The "tit-for-tat" impeachment game becomes less of a problem the fewer republicans there are in congress. I suggest that highly public impeachment proceedings with saturation coverage would be the first glimpse that most people get into the malevolent lawlessness of this administration. I mean, how else would the 92 percent who say TV news is their sole or primary source of information have discovered any of the high crimes BushCo is guilty of? So shine the spotlight on these roaches, cut off their ability to scurry for cover and let people actually hear the evidence and the lies.

Then, if people aren't quite as brain dead as they often seem, there will be such a groundswell of revulsion that the GOP will be discredited for decades with all but the religious nuts who comprise the last 25 or so percent continuing to support these maniacs.

If the votes aren't there to convict now, maybe a public airing will jam the capitol phone lines in such massive volume that senators will understand that a "nay" vote on the charges may just result in their having to work for a living for once in their privileged, sheltered lives.

And if all of the above fails, then we don't really deserve to live in a Constitutional republic, since we can't be trusted to guard it against enemies foreign and domestic. In which case, fuck it; I'm off to a civilized country to spend the rest of my life without worrying about the gestapo kicking in my door at 4:00 in the morning.


wp

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Great post, Warren

For me, the idea of war with Iran at this time is sufficient reason to impeach. It would be reason enough if none of the others you list so eloquently were in play.

For those who can't seem to grasp the concept that there is something wrong with killing mass numbers of Iranians for a threat that won't materialize for five to ten years, if at all, they should consider what such a war will do:

• A military force stretched to the breaking point will be stretched more. The United States may have had the strongest military force in the history of the world six years ago. Even that had finite limits; our military was used unwisely on top pf being overused.
• Iran has two and a half times the territory and people as Iraq;
• Iran is not Iraq and Ahmadinejad is not Saddam. They have elections in Iran which, while not altogether democratic, do give a sense of government at the consent of the governed. The Iranian economy is growing. Few Iranians, no matter how unhappy they are with Ahmadinejad, want to see there country invaded. There are more Iranians who feel that they have more to fight for than Iraqis. In short, while some Iraqis welcomed us a liberators for a day or two after Saddam fell, Bush will be hard pressed to find anybody in Iran throwing roses in the path of foreign invaders. It won't even be easy to find an Iranian to play the part of the quisling like Chalabi or Allawi.

Another reason related to Iran is simply one of the Bush Administration's credibility. They shot their wad on Iraq. Suppose I'm wrong (and it won't the first time) about this. Suppose Iran could have a nuke by Christmas and have every intention of using on us. Who would be foolish enough to Bush or Cheney or any other leading administration figure if he or she said so? They've cried "Wolf!" too often to be believed.

We need somebody in the White House who, no matter how much any of us may disagree with him or her, can still be believed when he tells us something very few of us really, really, really want to hear.