Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Take that

Tony Snow, in his latest press conference, claims that the Democrats have not laid a glove on either the Attorney General or the President. Oh yeah?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I may not know everything but this is one reason I am wondering about Conyers latest actions....

"Consequently, on Tuesday 11 March 2003, with the Bush Jr. administration's war of aggression against Iraq staring the American People, Congress and Republic in their face, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee (which has jurisdiction over Bills of Impeachment), convened an emergency meeting of forty or more of his top advisors, most of whom were lawyers. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and debate immediately putting into the U.S. House of Representatives Bills of Impeachment against President Bush Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft in order to head off the impending war. Congressman Conyers kindly requested that Ramsey Clark and I come to the meeting in order to argue the case for impeachment.
This impeachment debate lasted for two hours. It was presided over by Congressman Conyers, who quite correctly did not tip his hand one way or the other on the merits of impeachment. He simply moderated the debate between Clark and I, on the one side, favoring immediately filing Bills of Impeachment against Bush Jr. et al. to stop the threatened war, and almost everyone else there who were against impeachment for partisan political reasons. Obviously no point would be served here by attempting to digest a two-hour-long vigorous debate among a group of well-trained lawyers on such a controversial matter at this critical moment in American history. But at the time I was struck by the fact that this momentous debate was conducted at a private office right down the street from the White House on the eve of war.
Suffice it to say that most of the "experts" there opposed impeachment not on the basis of enforcing the Constitution and the Rule of Law, whether international or domestic, but on the political grounds that it might hurt the Democratic Party effort to get their presidential candidate elected in the year 2004. As a political independent, I did not argue that point. Rather, I argued the merits of impeaching Bush Jr., Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft under the United States Constitution, U.S. federal laws, U.S. treaties and other international agreements to which the United States is a party, etc. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution provides that treaties "shall be the supreme Law of the Land." This so-called Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution also applies to international executive agreements concluded under the auspices of the U.S. President such as the 1945 Nuremberg Charter.
Congressman Conyers was so kind as to allow me the closing argument in the debate. Briefly put, the concluding point I chose to make was historical: The Athenians lost their democracy. The Romans lost their Republic. And if we Americans did not act now we could lose our Republic! The United States of America is not immune to the laws of history!
After two hours of most vigorous debate among those in attendance, the meeting adjourned with second revised draft Bills of Impeachment sitting on the table."
F A Boyle

And this is why I do not want Hillary for President....

"Richard Holbrooke likes Hillary Clinton. In fact he may well be asked to serve as Secretary of State if she is to win the presidential campaign next year. Holbrooke, a Democratic adaptation of Henry Kissinger, loves her approach to foreign policy.
“She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband,” says Holbrooke, a former adviser to Bill Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is a classic national-security Democrat. She is better at framing national-security issues for the current era than her husband was at a common point in his career.”
Holbrooke is an example of just how scary a Clinton administration would be.
After Gerald Ford's loss and Jimmy Carter's ascendance into the White House in 1976, Indonesia requested additional arms to continue its brutal occupation, even though there was a supposed ban on arms trades to Suharto’s government. It was Carter's appointee to the Department of State's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Holbrooke, now a likely candidate to be nominated for Clinton’s Secretary of State, who authorized additional arms shipments to Indonesia during this supposed blockade. Many scholars have noted that this was the period when the Indonesian suppression of the Timorese reached genocidal levels."
J Frank


I am just saying....