Impeachment is not about justice. Impeachment is all about poltics.

[BurtWorm]

Personally, I think it's naive to expect impeachment to a) happen or b) if it were to happen, bring the Bushists to justice.

For the record: I wouldn't look the other way if Bush were ever to be impeached (which anyone with a brain knows will never happen). I would enjoy it as everyone on DU would. But that wouldn't detract from the ultimate truth that impeachment, even if it resulted in Bush's being unseated, would be letting the bastard get off easy. He's someone who--having caused hundreds of thousands of deaths for no reason other than to advance his reelection, who made up law as he went along, who unilaterally violated treaties and conventions far wiser American leaders than he agreed to, who used the levers of government to advance a minority partisan agenda against the consent of the governed--deserves to be in prison for the rest of his life.

I take some solace in knowing that history will regard these eight years as the worst thing to happen to the US since the Great Depression. There is some justice in that.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. I believe that impeachment does not give one double jeopardy

In other words, if Bush is ousted from office, he could then be prosecuted if it were found that he had violated law.

[BurtWorm]

3. Of course he could. Impeachment does not result in a criminal charge.

Impeachment is a tool to remove someone from office that those with the power to use it can wield if they so choose.

[magellan]

5. Exactly.

Which is why Cheney should be impeached first. That way he can't take Bush**'s place and pardon him.

Although I this point, I'm not sure the next in line -- Speaker of the House -- wouldn't then pardon the whole lot.

[Recursion]

9. Cheney would get to nominate a VP

There's no reasonable plan I can think of to remove both of them from office quickly enough to keep Cheney from nominating a VP first.

[magellan]

10. He can't if he's impeached first

Bush** could nominate a VP, but if he was impeached before whoever was confirmed, Pelosi would be President.

[MonkeyFunk]

16. The odds of 17 republicans in the senate voting to remove

even a cabinet member are less than 0.5%.

The odds of them voting to remove the vice President are probably < .005%

The odds of them voting to remove the President, in the absence of a vice president, thus handing the executive branch to the other party, are exactly 0%.

[Recursion]

7. "Judgment in cases of impeachment...

...shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law."

Article I, Section 3

[Ghost in the Machine]

2. Bullshit!

[ColbertWatcher]

4. If that's true, then the GOP will vote against it. n/t

[L. Coyote]

6. Herr Plunk, goes a big doolap of elephant doo! OR R BS!

Watch what happens as evidence emerges!!

You are not thinking like prosecutor.
It does not matter if you know a crime has occurred.
What matters is if you have the evidence in hand!!!

Why do you suppose 10 million e-mails went missing?
Why do you suppose executive privilege is asserted?
Why do you suppose state secrets is asserted?
To avoid Justice and Impeachment, to keep the evidence from those who would prosecute!

It is not about politics, it is about the evidence.
When enough evidence is bared, it is just a matter of due course of justice. And inevitable!!

[slipslidingaway]

13. !!! n/t

[spanone]

8. impeachment is about justice...congress is about politics

[slipslidingaway]

11. That is exactly what my Republican Rep, says...

"Impeachment is all about poltics."

:(

[L. Coyote]

14. Precisely the wing nut talking point, except when they impeach!!

Deja DU: Bush vs. Gore, the 'Arkansas Project,' the USA firings, and the Swiftboat Admiral
Jun-02-07 - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1029113

[slipslidingaway]

38. Thanks for the link! n/t

[WritersBlock]

12. At this point, impeachment is about preventing it from ever happening again.

Failure to impeach is tacit approval of everything this administration has done, including pre-emptive war, torture, and the erasure of civil liberties.

Failure to impeach is also a blatant and clear message that the next would-be dictator who wants to make up the rules as he or she goes along will not face any resistance.

It's not about justice. It's about survival of our country as we knew it.

Or thought we knew it.

[L. Coyote]

15. Not to mention, preventing retaliaton for Bush's war crimes!!

Unfortunately, war does not end by unilateral decision!

It is easy to start one, sometimes impossible to end one!!
Especially if you have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

[AuntPatsy]

17. whole heartedly agree.....

"Impeach" hold up the sword of justice and demand those quilty are brought to justice....

:kick:

[BurtWorm]

27. It 's going to take a lot more than impeachment to undo the damage.

Impeachment won't even touch the damage. It will just lay it out, as it's been laid out here on DU and in the blogosphere for years and years. But it won't change anything.

[sammythecat]

29. Of course it won't undo any damage.

Imprisoning a murderer doesn't undo any damage either.

I know impeachment isn't going to happen, but I also know it SHOULD happen. If we had an honest press and government it would happen. But we don't.

This complacent, "let's move on, what's done is done", attitude just drives me nuts.

"Hey, you just knocked out my front teeth and pissed on my face, but if you stop doing that, I'm willing to let bygones be bygones. OK? I can't waste any more time on what happened in the last half hour. I'm going to wash my face and see if I can find money somewhere to get my teeth fixed. See ya tomorrow :hi:"

Let's forget about Bush and his cronies and the death and INCALCULABLE damage they've done. They'll get their comeuppance in the history books and then they'll be feel bad.

Sorry, that's just not enough for me. I need a little more than some unfavorable remarks in a history book.

[BurtWorm]

30. What is more necessary? That the Bushists pay for their crimes

or that the damage be undone? If you had to choose one or the other, which would you choose?

[sammythecat]

31. What responsible person has a choice?

The Bushists need to be held accountable and the damage needs to be undone. One isn't an option for the other.

Really, can't we prosecute the arsonist and rebuild the structure? Does it make any sense at all to do one and not the other. I could make a list a mile long of examples like this and I'm sure you could too.

Like I said somewhere else here today, I'm not a particularly vengeful person at all. I find it impossible to hold a grudge for any length of time even if I try. I just lose interest after a while. But, my God, the outright criminality of this administration is simply outrageous. If they're not held accountable for all the ruin and sorrow they've brought onto us and others in the world, just what in the world would be? If George Bush was caught plinking citizens from the White House bedroom window with his rifle he'd be impeached (I think!), but yet what he's done is far, far worse than that. It really is stupendous, what he's cost this country and Iraq in money and lives. Forget the shredded constitution, the torture, the national humiliation of his very presence, he and his cronies LIED in order to bring the full weight and terror of the U.S. military to bear on a country for no damn good reason. They manipulated this country into doing something that everyone in the world knew was going to result in the death of thousands. They lied and deceived Americans so that they would kill Iraqi's. NONE of this would have happened if we'd known the truth. If this doesn't demand full justice, then nothing does. But we're going to give them a pass. It's too much trouble and we can't do more than one thing at a time.

If I lie to a cop, and say the man in the blue shirt has a gun pointed at someone and he's going to pull the trigger, then the cop shoots the guy and finds out I knew all along the guy had no gun, or any bad intent at all. I'm not a lawyer, I don't know what the charge would be, but I know it would be something pretty damn serious. How is the moral problem here ANY different, at all, from what this administration did with us and Iraq?

These guys are white collar killers. Nothing less than that. They made others pull the trigger; at least a hundred thousand times. They really are killers of historic magnitude.

I'm not suggesting that you are unaware of any of this, or that you are anything less than a fervent Democrat. Not at all. And you're not alone in your stance. It seems to me that you think pursuing justice in this case would somehow interfere with our efforts to right the wrongs. That's the part I can't get. We have 300 million people and, despite the constant hemorrhage of money spent for nothing, we're still the richest nation on Earth. The notion that we can't work to restore everything they've broken and, at the same time, bring the full weight of the law to bear on these criminal bastards is a notion I can't accept.

In the end though, they'll get away with it. We'll do nothing other than scowl at them, and members of the administration will write essays, make appearances to enthusiastic crowds, think at think tanks, and generally have a comfortable retirement. Bush and Cheney will get state funerals and be mourned when they die, after all there's still about 90 million idiots in this country who still worship these pricks. Life will go on for those of us who weren't killed during these last 8 years, and Bush will get a cautiously unfavorable bio in 10th grade P.O.D.

My disgust over this issue is total. I'm an American because I live here and that's about it. If they get away with this (and they will), then we deserved everything they've done. Sometimes Justice really does need to be served, both as punishment AND deterrence.

[BurtWorm]

33. If it's a question of priority and resources, one needs to take precedence over the other.

There is no question that the Bushists are due for justice, given the extent of their crimes against the constitution, the country and the world. The awful truth is, they may never get their due. The patterns of history painfully show that the powerful, in this country especially, are rarely adequately punished for their crimes, if they're punished at all. (Exhibit A: Henry Kissinger.) The true elite in the US--the ones who mock Obama for being an 'elitist'--will take all measures necessary to take care of their own--and this includes the Democratic Party establishment firmly ensconced in the corridors of the Capitol, the think tanks inside the Beltway, and halls of academe. These are the people who control the levers of justice, the levers of government, the levers of media. They have a very efficient system for domination. They will prevail, unfortunately, as they always do, in suppressing the impulse to punish the Bushists for their abuse of power. It is simply not in their interest to punish one of their own for what they view as "governing" or "administering" American power.

This is not as it should be, this is just how it is. DUers can scream about the injustice until they're blue in the face. They can flood Congress with their phone calls and faxes and e-mails. It won't change a thing. Impeachment has effectively been marginalized. It might have been different if the math was different in Congress in 2006. It might have been different if the Bushists had really pissed off the real elite the way Clintons did. But the math is what it is, and, unfortunately, the powerful are what they are. They won't jump because basic justice demands that they jump.

The damage still has to be undone.

[mmonk]

18. Or the beginning of the end of the American experiment.

No justice equals no consequences.

[librechik]

19. Fine. I guess we can just proceed into the future as an outlaw nation.

Nobody will notice that we never did the right thing and brought war criminals to court for accountability. It won't hurt our standing as a world power at all that we have no rule of law, that we ignore treaties and torture. Other nations won't be reluctant to deal with us. They just won't. And that will be fine. Who needs to be a good, trustworthy and humanitarian citizen of the world? NOT US!!!

Nope, it won't make a bit of difference.

[BurtWorm]

23. The cure for Bush is Obama.

If Obama doesn't cure us of Bush, nothing short of revolution will.

[librechik]

25. Hope

is not a strategy. We need a revolution, sadly.

[BurtWorm]

26. Not just hope. If you take Obama seriously, he is all about revolution

Not radical revolution, but revolution from the top. But revolution away from individualism toward communitarianism. If it leads to ending the war in Iraq and restoring the balance of powers, for example, it will undo some of the damage Bushism wrought. Maybe a lot of it.

[Uncle Joe]

20. I believe when impeachment is conducted properly , it's about both politics and justice.

If impeachment is never brought against Cheney/Bush, then precedent is set for future and even more radical abuses of the Constitution by any administration. If this Congress doesn't speak out after all the high crimes and misdemeanors already on record, then the terms high crimes and misdemeanors mean nothing. To that extent even if there aren't enough votes in the Senate to convict, I believe this is important enough to at least make the attempt.

Impeachment is not the end all but they can't be prosecuted while still in office.

I believe history will regard these eight years as the worst period of Administrative abuse, betrayal and corruption since our nation's founding, but how will it regard a Congress that refuses to act in the face of such atrocity?

[Old and In the Way]

21. I totally agree Uncle Joe!

"If impeachment is never brought against Cheney/Bush, then precedent is set for future and even more radical abuses of the Constitution by any administration."

Will the Bush precedent be used to not impeach the next idiot that decides to nuke a few countries, just be cause we can?

[BurtWorm]

24. Nonsense. Impeachment is totally dependent on its time.

If Dems had firm control of both chambers, Bush would have already been impeached. If some other monster gets in and his/her party controls one or both chambers, he/she'll do whatever the fuck they want to do. Impeachment is no cure against tyranny. It's one tool, and it's not guaranteed to work, or to be used as needed.

[Fire Walk With Me]

22. Impeach AND prosecute.

[Fire Walk With Me]

32. Impeachment shakes away their protection. Prosecution controls and isolates them.

See, problem solved.

[BurtWorm]

36. Severe unpopularity over how they've manifestly fucked up everything they've touched

has shaken away their protection.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

28. Clinton's impeachment certainly didn't involve 'justice'. Perhaps, 'justice' is best reflected,...

,...by prosecuting crimes, ESPECIALLY CRIMES AGAINST THE PEOPLE.

Clinton's crime was lying about an act that was not a crime against the people.

On the other hand, I have no doubt numerous members of this administration can be charged with a slew of criminal acts against the people, this nation, the laws of this land, including the Constitution. NO DOUBT!

[KharmaTrain]

34. Two Issues Mixed As One...

Somehow some here believe impeachment is some magic wand that will make all the troubles of the world go away. They dream of booosh and cheney being frogmarched out of the White House, the Constitution will somehow be magically healed or restored and everything will be sweetness and light. Anyone who doesn't agree with this is obviously some kind of appeaser or hates Dennis Kucinich or has bad breath.

As you so properly state, impeachment IS Political...while its conducted as a criminal investigation, the jury is already rigged and even though they are the "finder of facts", we saw how these finders can find lying about a hummer is worthy while obstructing justice and income tax evasion aren't worthy (ask Helmet Hair Lott). Justice means nothing when you have 33 rigged jurors who, no matter what "compelling evidence" or some magic fairy dust will NOT see the light and will go over the abyss with this regime...and that is where the rub is...and where the anger should be.

There's the criminal side of this regime...a ton of it that is more germain to what Congressman Kucinich charges. Many of the articles he introduced have direct criminal implications on many, but not directly to booosh. I'm certain with a bit more digging and the removal of both this regime's ability to stonewall and intimidate, we'll get that gun and more. McClellan is the first to break the Omarta...but I submit he's not the last and as each story comes out, we come a step closer to the truth and then to address the Constitutional crimes of this regime.

History will be harsh on both this regime and the Democrats who timidly stood back and went along with all the destruction this regime has brought. While I would hope it would destroy the repugnican brand for years to come, the short-term memory will forget all that's happened unless there are investigations and some kind of restitution once this regime is removed. I really like Jonathan Turley's idea of setting up an Independent Prosecutor and let him/her go after all the criminality (with a rejuvenated Justice Department).

Cheers...

[BurtWorm]

35. I agree with everything you said, Kharma Train.

:toast:

[KharmaTrain]

37. Burt...Always Good To Have You On My Side

I guess this is better than the Obama/Hillary pissing matches. GD is getting back to normal again. :rofl:

:toast:

[Disturbed]

39. Independent Prosecutor

:thumbsup: