Impeachment -- the video. The impeachment of Dick Cheney, that is. Go here for more. There's stuff for you to do.
According to this poll, the majority of Americans favor the impeachment of Cheney. 45% favor the impeachment of George Bush. Yes, it is hard to believe that we do not yet have a majority on that one. As I've long said, the proper poll question is not "Do you support impeachment if...? but a simple, unadorned "Do you support impeachment?"
Congress will experience testicular growth when that 45% becomes 55%. Refresh my memory: Did a majority of the American people support the removal of Richard Nixon when the impeachment process began against him?
Odom: Three-star General William Odom, a former head of the NSA, comes out if "sort of" support for impeachment. His focus is on withdrawal from Iraq:
...the first step should be to rally the public by providing an honest and candid definition of what "supporting the troops" really means and pointing out who is and who is not supporting our troops at war. The next step should be a flat refusal to appropriate money for to be used in Iraq for anything but withdrawal operations with a clear deadline for completion.Side note: Odom insists that the size of our Army must be doubled to fulfill duties in Afghnistan and Iraq. He knows full well that that outcome would require conscription, which is politically impossible.
The final step should be to put that president on notice that if [he]ignores this legislative action and tries to extort Congress into providing funds by keeping U.S. forces in peril, impeachment proceeding will proceed in the House of Representatives. Such presidential behavior surely would constitute the "high crime" of squandering the lives of soldiers and Marines for his own personal interest.
Will we win? Does it matter? Convincing enough Republican senators to cross the line may seem like an impossible hurdle, although I think that folks within G.O.P. circles have had quite enough of Dick and his antics, and many have even turned on W. One Kos commenter makes the argument that, win or lose, impeachment can be a successful strategy for Democrats:
Democrats win by forcing Republicans to support a discredited president and Democrats win by getting enough Republican votes to convict. It's win-win.Or, as David Lindorff puts it:
Impeachment is not about conviction and removal in the Senate. Impeachment is a stand-alone action of the House of Representatives, and requires a simple majority.An impeachment center has opened here in Los Angeles.
Under the Constitution, there is no obligation for the Senate to even hold a trial after someone is impeached. It is an option, which is up to the will of the Senate.
When the Founding Fathers drew up the impeachment clause, they envisioned it as its own punishment.
New Hampshire's legislature may soon be the nation's first to issue a formal call for impeachment.
The Osama-Saddam link. The video shown above cites Cheney's misleading allegations of a Bin Laden/Iraq connection as a reason for impeachment. But should we focus on this issue? The argument is, as we noted earlier, murkier than most on the left would believe. I do not believe that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had a working relationship, but Cheney usually phrased his insinuations with cunning and care. He can justify nearly every point he made by referring to some piece of analysis he received from the Office of Special Plans.
Of course, the OSP was a cabal of neocon loyalists intent on giving the evidence a hawkish spin, in order to sidestep the more cautious assessments of the CIA. In short, his pals at OSP gave Cheney cover. He can now say: "Hey, I was just relating what I heard from the experts at the DIA."
Cheney's final revenge: He will preside over the Senate in January, 2009, to count the votes from the electoral college.
With a potential independent run by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raising the possibility of all kinds of Electoral College deal-making in 2008, the prospect of Cheney at the lectern tallying ballots should cause some trepidation.
3 comments:
I have to assume this was a telephone survey, which means it was landlines, not cellular. What would those percentages be like if young voters who have only cell phones were polled in proportion to their numbers?
Needless to say, I’m all for impeachment. However, I would also prefer the convictions in the senate of both cheney and bush, because I don’t trust that they’ll just leave after being impeached and the LAST thing I want is for these thugs to just slip through that Jan. 20 crack. What I fear is that, should the senate choose not to take up the trial, for whateve r their strategic reasons, it will be advertised as a victory for bush and the repugs.
One of the things that is giving dem leaders in congress pause, I suspect, is that so many of them are former prosecutors (Leahy, for instance, and Kerry). What they know, just as Fitz knew, is that you doom your case if you indict without solid evidence.
Impeachment is our greatest tool in a threatening case like this. I would hate to squander it prematurely. I’m not saying any of us should diminish our passion about this; quite the contrary, because the louder our voices, the more likely it is to happen.
However, I do hope that folks will keep the fact I just shared in mind when they start feeling grumpy and betrayed by dems in congress because it isn’t happening fast enough. Let’s do this, by all means, but let’s do this RIGHT. Just going off
And sure, I know I know, like we don’t have enough evidence. But these creeps are nothing if not vigilant about protecting their sorry asses. Plausible deniability is their mantra, I don’t remember their rosary, and it was someone else’s responsibility their daily prayer. They have iron-clad alibis for everything because that’s all they focus on, what they can get away with. And I DON’T want them to get away with impeachment without conviction.
The only saving grace we can look toward, though, is that there are still the courts. And if dems take over power in 09, well…. This must be their worst nightmare, of course.
If NH submits articles of impeachment, can that run simultaneous to the Cheney impeachment? It would make logical sense, the way some criminals are sometimes tried together for the same crime.
And yeah, what of those polls at this stage with Nixon? I was wondering just that today. Things are a bit different because there was this concrete crime with concrete criminals and there was this one hearing that riveted the country (something like 84% of American households tuned into it nightly!). But this, interestingly enough, is SO multifaceted, there are SO MANY crimes and SO MANY perps, it just boggles the mind. And unfortunately, glazes the eyes of the ordinary citizen.
But then again, evidently not so much that they don’t recognize what’s going on is impeachable.
Ain’t this somethin’? The dems are in control six months, and look how far we’ve come. No wonder the WH is complaining about the rabid congressional hearings! They had no oversight, and now the grown-ups are in charge!
You know the saying about the thing that broke the camel's back....
one more straw on top of the hay stack..
I think that the Libbey thing is it.
I have no proof, no good argument or scientifically conducted poll, it's just my gut feeling!
Let's just see how this un-folds!
Revolutions have started with less provocations than this.
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