Tag: Impeachment

Democrats Opted Not to Impeach Reagan After He Failed to Consult Congress before Invading Grenada in 1983

Jon Ponder

There they go again. The drumbeat on the right for impeaching Pres. Obama is reaching a feverish pitch.

The GOP put impeaching the president on the table last summer, even before it was a cinch they would retake the House in November. Over at the birtherist site, World Nut Daily, they even published a book listing putative impeachable offenses against the president titled, “The Case for Impeachment: Why Barack Hussein Obama Should be Impeached to Save America.” One notable offense in the book: The president, or someone at the White House, reportedly allowed pop stars Beyonce and Jay-Z to have their photographs taken in the White House Situation Room.

Then, as the midterms drew near, Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican who would chair the House Oversight Committee, where impeachment investigations usually originate, described the president to Rush Limbaugh as “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times” and announced that he would increase the size of the committee’s staff. (Issa, who should know from corruption — he’s a suspected arsonist and was charged with grand theft auto in 1980 — later tried to walk back his characterization of the president.)

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the history-challenged prospective GOP presidential candidate, also piled on, suggesting that if Republicans gained control of Congress, they should forget governing and do nothing but investigate the president. “Oh, I think that’s all we should do,” she said. “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on. And it’s very important when we come back that we have constitutional conservative leadership because the American people’s patience is about this big.”

Now, in the wake of Pres. Obama’s order last Friday to bomb Libya in preparation for establishing a no-fly zone, right-wing radio talkers and others on GOP propaganda outlets are clamoring once again for impeachment. Critics of the president charge that he violated the War Powers Clause by initiating the bombing without first seeking approval of Congress.

[…]

Will Republicans Take Impeaching Obama off the Table If They Win Control of Congress in November?

Jon Ponder

From left: Prospective House Speaker Boehner, House Oversight Chairman Issa, House Judiciary Chairman Smith, Senate Judiciary Chairman Sessions. Would they impeach Obama? You betcha.
From left: Prospective House Speaker Boehner, House Oversight Chairman Issa, House Judiciary Chairman Smith, Senate Judiciary Chairman Sessions. Would they impeach Obama? You betcha.
In May 2006, with the midterm elections just six months away, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to assure conservatives that if Democrats won control of Congress that November, any efforts to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be “off the table.”

Now, four years later, with Republicans within range of winning control of the House and possibly the Senate, their tea bagger and neo-con base is sending an equally clear signal: They want Obama impeached, and they don’t much care how or why.

[…]

Poll: Bush Approval at 24% – Still Incredibly High for Worst President Ever

Jon Ponder

Reuters/Zogby poll:

Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent.

By contrast, Pres. Nixon was around 25 percent in the polls on the day he resigned. Both his numbers and Bush’s reflect the fact that about a quarter of Americans are dangerously delusional.

Approval of Congress remains low:

A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month’s record low.

Ironically, the low approval of Congress is probably due to the fact they haven’t impeached Bush or stopped his war.

Bush: “Childrens Do Learn”

Trish

…But presidentses have lost the ability to form sentences.

On pretty much a daily basis, Bush says something weird or phrases something wrong. Yesterday was no exception.

With a group of New York City elementary school students standing behind him, President Bush touted higher national test scores by proudly declaring: “Childrens do learn.”

…Bush followed with another cringe-worthy slipup: “Congress needs to work with this administration to pass legislation that helps gives our children the education they deserve.”

We believe the evidence indicates Bush has moved beyond the cute dumb stage to the dangerously incoherent stage, and someone needs to act. Very soon.

Bush: Saddam Hussein Killed Nelson Mandela

Trish

What is Bush on?

In a speech defending his administration’s Iraq policy, Mr Bush said former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s brutality had made it impossible to unite the country.

Bush: “Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”

“I heard somebody say, ‘Where’s Mandela?’,” he said.

“Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”

The bizarre gaffe was made in a press conference in Washington yesterday.

Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for preaching racial harmony and guiding the nation into the post-apartheid era.

References to his death – Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail – are seen as insensitive in South Africa.

Ya think? I imagine they’d be seen as insensitive anywhere, not to mention too stupid to contemplate

We already told you about the delusional antics of our president during his recent visit to Southeast Asia and Australia. We also postulated that Bush has advanced Lyme Disease, which causes brain fog and psychosis. But even we are becoming alarmed. This is getting way beyond just mispronouncing “nuclear.”

The Week magazine noted another mysterious Bush mistake.

He talked of the danger of terrorist groups such as “Jenna Islaaanah Nia,” which no one had ever head of (one can only assume that meant Jemaah Islamiyah).

The leader of the Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, Abu Dujana, was arrested in June in connection with the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, along with more recent attacks. But hey, Bush knows someone named Jenna and it sounds a lot like that.

The Week also quoted the Sydney Morning Herald’s Annabel Crabb about Bush’s public speaking meltdowns in her country.

One could almost sense the craning CIA sharpshooters wearily exchanging their live rounds for tranquilizer darts.

“Time to get the big guy out of there, Hank?”

“Roger that, Chuck.”

If only it were that easy.

White House Refuses to Name Mystery I.T. Firm

Trish

ABC’s Brian Ross is reporting that the White House is refusing to name the company it farmed out its email management to. You know, the one whose fault it supposedly is that we can’t read Karl Rove’s email.

The White House will not identify a private company which appears to be involved in the disappearance of millions of White House e-mails.

The company was responsible for reviewing and archiving White House e-mails, a White House official told congressional staff in May, according to a letter yesterday from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Congressional investigators asked then for the name of the company and “have repeatedly requested” the information since then, according to Waxman.

Resistance is futile, thanks to Richard Nixon.

According to the White House, at least five million e-mails were not properly archived and may be lost forever, in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act. The post-Watergate law states that communications relating to official activity in the offices of the president and vice president are owned by the American public and cannot be destroyed.

Waxman’s new deadline to stop the stonewalling is Sept. 10.

In addition to requesting the firm’s name, Waxman’s staff has also asked to see a White House report which detailed the days on which few or no e-mails were archived; the White House has been similarly unresponsive to that request, Waxman charged, and asked it provide the document by Sept. 10 as well.

Maybe the White House strategy is to stonewall it until Jan. 20, 2009 and then put Bush on one of those secret flights to Eastern Europe and send Cheney to the bunker.

Starting With No Exit Strategy Means No End in Sight

Trish

The question isn’t “Will we leave Iraq?” The question is, “When will we leave, and how do we begin that process?” Bush answers by insisting we can’t leave now. He never says when we can, and that’s because he never had an exit strategy beyond shock and awe and mission accomplished. After three months, he was out of ideas.

See this film. If your nearest theater isn’t listed here, email them. I did, and they answered immediately and told me it’s coming my way soon.

Chickenhawk Bush Has the Gall to Lecture Americans on Vietnam

Jon Ponder

When you hear the sound bites from George W. Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today in which he compares his botched war in Iraq to the Vietnam war, think about what he was doing while thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and killed in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Bush is in effect saying that Vietnam could have been won if only we’d stayed there longer — that winning would have only required a few tens of thousand more lives lost — other than his own, of course.

As is well known, Bush’s elite status entitled him to a cushy berth in a “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard. Associates from that era remember young Bush as being preoccupied with doing drugs, driving drunk and chasing women. There are rumors he seriously damaged a fighter jet while taxiing it on a runway while hungover. And there is strong circumstantial evidence he was discharged less than honorably after failing to show up for a series of Pentagon-mandated drug tests.

With that in mind, here is how Bush today, rewriting and politicizing the war he sat out:

The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end…

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?” A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

[…]