Bush Impeachment Polls More Like Nixon Than Clinton

[DeSwiss]

Bush Impeachment Polls More Like Nixon Than Clinton

October 6, 2007

In March 2006, the Wall Street Journal found that public support for impeaching President Bush was nearly the peak support for impeaching President Clinton. This was in spite of eight years of 24/7 scandal mongering and impeachment talk and an actual impeachment trial in Clinton's case, and a virtual news blackout on the grassroots movement to impeach Bush. This got me wondering -- what did Nixon's impeachment poll numbers look like when he resigned rather than face impeachment? I searched the net a couple of times and couldn't find the relevant stats, so I had to go into the LA Times archives. It turns out that a day before Nixon resigned, his poll numbers were not that different from Bush's: 55% of Americans wanted him removed, and 64% thought there should at least be an impeachment trial in the Senate.








The earliest polls I could find nine months before that showed LESS support for impeaching Nixon than Bush. One poll showed the public divided on impeachment and the other solidly opposed. This was a week and a half after the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal#Saturday_Night_Massacre">Saturday Night Massacre when Nixon fired Justice Department officials until he found someone willing to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, so the public had some idea of his wrong-doing. So how is it one president was impeached when most of the public didn't think it was necessary, one president ran out of office when a solid majority thought he should be impeached, but a third president with a similar majority in favor of impeachment remains untouched?

For a while, you could blame the media and Congress equally. The public clearly saw the laws, treaties, our constitution, and basic human decency being violated, but the media turned a blind eye or excused it, and Congress either ignored the crimes or retro-actively made them legal. The Democrats at least had the fig-leaf that they were not in control of Congress to hide behind for their inaction. Now they do not. Nor can they say that the media is entirely subservient to Bush since even a corporate boot-lick like Chris Matthews feels free to criticize Bush. Even if the media were still entirely hostile, they would be obliged to cover impeachment proceedings, and when the offenses of the Bush administration were cataloged and described without Karl Rove or Fox News' spin support for impeachment would likely grow even greater.

The real issue of course is not whether impeachment will succeed or fail, or how popular it is, but whether Congress will represent us, whether we have a real democracy or just enough of a semblance of one to lull us to sleep, whether our most basic laws apply to all people including the most powerful, and whether this country belongs to all the American people or just the few that can afford to buy the friendship of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And apparently, the friendship of most of our Congress, Democrat as well as Republican, is bought and paid for as well -- and not by us.

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2007/10/poll-numbers-on-impeaching-bush-like.html">Link

- I'm sure Nixon is spinning in his grave. Okay, I hope he's spinning.....

[provis99]

1. if a President can't get impeached

for lying your way into an illegal, immoral, war of aggression, where his corporate buddies make billions off the bodies of dead soldiers, what can the President get impeached for? Does he have to murder his mother and snort cocaine off her still warm corpse in front of national television? What is the criteria anymore?

[DeSwiss]

2. I agree completely....

...what does it take, indeed?

Although, when the Nixon cabal was becoming unraveled, the country had already been in Vietnam almost a decade and a half, and the death toll was reaching ever closer toward 50,000. Kissinger had been exposed has having initiated the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the cities around the country seemed spent - from the war, from the riots, inflation out of control, and then there was Nixon.

Things were much more tense then, and the feeling that a crisis of monumental proportions loomed, and often felt like electricity in the air. We'd not come this close to anarchy before. And the Watergate hearings were ratcheting up the drama and sense of crisis toward a climax that no one knew where it might lead. Even the Republicans had the decency to be appalled by Nixon. Then the rumors of a drunken Nixon plodding through the White House in the wee hours, talking to portraits of past Presidents, made us wonder if he'd already gone over the edge. So with everything that Bush has done, you would think that the people who now sit in Congress would never forget that. And yet Nixon's crimes and Constitutional violations pale by comparison to the atrocities of Bush.

The only thing that I can use to try to make any sense of all this, is a saying that my grandfather use to tell me: "the frying pan can't call the skillet black." Even as a child I knew what it meant. But not until now can I see a perfect example. It may be that the jadedness of our Congress and the degree of corruption from corporate influence and money pervades the system to such a degree, that is has resulted in rendering the impeachment process moot. The levers of governance frozen, either in shock, or indifference. At least for now.

But no matter how this works out, and no matter what the Congress does, or does not do in the end, they'll never get back what they've lost. A semblance of integrity.