Politics and Press

The Coming Vote To Impeach

All votes are important. All elections are important. But in the general election fast approaching this November we have a chance to dump enough Republicans from Congress and elect enough [angry] Democrats to produce an impeachment team in the House and a majority vote to convict in the Senate. The target of course is George W. Bush. This man will go down in history as one of our worst Presidents - he is guilty of deception and incompetence on a grand scale. Those two qualities are a tough combination, almost an oxymoron, but Bush has managed both. It is a combination that equates to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitutional requirement for impeachment. We can use other terms, such as abuse of power and gross misconduct, to justify Bush’s impeachment, but deception and incompetence seem to capture the man. His grand deception is Iraq, which is also his greatest failure. But that is not to say that there are no contenders. The failure to deal with Katrina would stand out in any other presidency and forever brand such a president for that failure alone. But Bush has so much more. His domestic spying. His “off-site” prisons. His abandonment of Afghanistan. His ignorance of all things environmental. His perverted tax policies. But it is his deception, which he used to convince too many Americans and far too many Congressman, that we must invade Iraq and his incompetence in dealing with Iraq post-invasion that are the foundation of his impeachment. He followed the neo-cons’ grand strategy of empire. Publicly, he argued the need to separate Hussein from non-existent WMD. He represented to Congress only those facts that supported the invasion. His administration ignored, and even attacked, those who presented contrary facts. This rush to war, this deception has resulted in, according to one very recent estimate, over 600,000 Iraqi dead. Bush’s startling incompetence in the aftermath of the invasion has torn that country apart - the infrastructure is gone, the rule of law [such as it was] is gone, civil and social life is gone. The Iraqi people are dying. US and British soldiers are dying. The world is tired of it all. We, the people are tired of Bush and his deception, his incompetence. We need a new Congress - a Congress that will act to rid us and the world of this man. Vote this November and let the games begin.