Tag: Impeachment

Today the Bangor News in Maine has joined the PR’s call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Even as support trickles in, the odds are slim that Bush and Cheney will ever be impeached for lying to the public in the run-up to the Iraq War. Still, here’s a fun scenario to consider: If the Dems were to take the House in November ’06, Impeachment could move forward. If the Senate were to rule against Bush and Cheney, the big office would go to the third in line, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, right.

The Presidency of Nancy Pelosi may seem like pie in the sky but – and here’s something I thought I’d never say – let’s look at the shining example of former Talibani congressman Bob Barr whose cock-eyed optimism and black-hearted loathing of President Clinton paid off in the late 1990’s. More than a year before the world was introduced to Monica Lewinsky and her blue Gap dress, Barr ignored Clinton’s high poll numbers and filed impeachment proceedings against him :

In November [1997], long before Monica, Barr introduced a resolution to open a congressional impeachment inquiry: Clinton, reads its text, “has engaged in a systemic effort to obstruct, undermine, and compromise … the executive branch.” And since Clinterngate broke, Barr has been in a state of high gloat. He’s now preparing articles of impeachment and happily adding obstruction of justice and perjury to his list of Clintonian high crimes.

Of course, Barr made a fatal error in ignoring President Clinton’s high polling. As the impeachment played out, Clinton’s poll numbers stayed high, and it was his popularity that finally scared a few Senate Republicans into ruling in his favor.

Today, we’re faced with malfeasance in the White House far graver than a sex lie. But is there even a remote chance these men will be impeached? Norm Solomon lays it out, at TomPaine.com:

Five months into 2005, the movement to impeach Bush is very small. And three enormous factors weigh against it: 1) Republicans control Congress. 2) Most congressional Democrats are routinely gutless. 3) Big media outlets shun the idea that the president might really be a war criminal.

For now, we can’t end the GOP’s majority. But we could proceed to light a fire under congressional Democrats. And during the next several weeks, it’s possible to have major impacts on news media by launching a massive educational and “agitational” campaign—spotlighting the newly leaked Downing Street Memo and explaining why its significance must be pursued as a grave constitutional issue.

The leak of the memo weeks ago, providing minutes from a high-level meeting that Prime Minister Tony Blair held with aides in July 2002, may be the strongest evidence yet that Bush is guilty of an impeachable offense. As Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in late May:

• “First, the memo appears to directly contradict the administration’s assertions to Congress and the American people that it would exhaust all options before going to war. According to the minutes, in July 2002, the administration had already decided to go to war against Iraq.”
• “Second, a debate has raged in the United States over the last year and one half about whether the obviously flawed intelligence that falsely stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was a mere ‘failure’ or the result of intentional manipulation to reach foreordained conclusions supporting the case for war. The memo appears to close the case on that issue stating that in the United States the intelligence and facts were being ‘fixed’ around the decision to go to war.”

Update: Rep. Conyers has 86,000 signatures on his letter demanding an explanation of the contents of the memo from President Bush. Even you’re lukewarm on impeachment, you’d still like to hear an explanation – right? It only takes a minute. Do it!

DailyKos has a diary entry from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) who says a report leaked to the London Times provides proof positive that the Bush and Blair administrations were on the course to war in Iraq long before they started “marketing” the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to their hapless citizens in September 2002.

The [Royal Airforce Force] and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.

The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make “regime change” in Iraq legal.

Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that “the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime”.

The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows that the allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001, and that the RAF increased their attacks even more quickly than the Americans did.

Rep. Conyers has written a letter to President Bush demanding an explanation for the inconsistencies between his Administration’s statements both before and after the fall of Saddam and the emerging record of the facts.

The conservatives who control our Congress are far too corrupt to investigate the Bush Administration, especially if there is a better than even chance the Bushites did something that might lead to impeachment, which this matter certainly could. Don’t roll your eyes. As I’ve noted before, Andrew Johnson was impeached for firing a cabinet member and Bill Clinton was impeached over sex lie told under oath. The lies told by Bush and company have led to the deaths of tens of thousands.

Even if the chance are slim that a serious investigation will take place, you can take action. It only takes a minute to sign the letter.