Impeachment off the table ... why?

By DOLPH HONICKER

"President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness ... has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy ... His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to ..." --David Halberstam


Who are the criminals today? Look in the mirror. It is we who allowed a criminal regime to take over, to shred our Constitution while we, a nation of sheep, doped out on American Idol, Survivors, Jerry Springer.

The Democratic victory in November of 2006 was a phony spring. Winter chills set in when House Speaker Nancy Polosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced they were taking impeachment off the table, thus giving Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Karl Rove & Co. free rein to run rampant.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer's recent attempt to revive impeachment comes many days late and half a trillion dollars short.

George W. Bush verus the U.S. Constitution, with a forward by Rep. John Conyers Jr. and an introduction by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson laid out the criminal articles for impeachment in 287 pages in 2006. Since then, an addendum could add many hundred more pages.

Had such an impeachment been brought forward, it should have been a twofer with Cheney as the lead defendant -- Cheney the war lover who skipped Vietnam with five deferments.

An event that churned my stomach in early July was a speech Bush delivered to a safe audience in Cleveland. He used his father to make a point -- not his heavenly father, but the one whose sperm spawned him.

You see, Bush said, Japan was our mortal enemy during World War II. And his daddy flew a torpedo bomber. He was shot down. He was a hero (true). Now Japan is one of our strongest allies. That's what we're doin' in Iraq today. Some day, just let me pour more and more troops into the maw, and we'll be one happy family.

You craven so-and-so, I wanted to yell, Vietnam is a trading partner today. Why don't you tell us about your heroic exploits in Vietnam, protecting the friendly skies of Texas, partying and politicking in Alabama before opting out of the Texas Air National Guard early after family influence got you in ahead of 500 other recruits.

As much as I hold Dubya in disdain, I yield to a 20,000-word article July 3 by Washington Post writers Baron Gelllman and Jo Becker to express my feelings for Cheney.

Cheney, they write, has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant president he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

The August Vanity Fair has run Halberstam's last article before his untimely death, "The History Boys."

"Recently," Halberstam wrote, "Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them."

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzbg sums up Cheney:

"Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country's moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of 'cruel,' 'inhuman,' and 'degrading' treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: 'a no-brainer for me'), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, or course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself ..."

Is there any reason why Cheney and Bush should not be impeached, convicted and their cases sent to the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague to be tried for war crimes?

No.

Pythian Press.