Courage to Change the Things I Can: Impeachment

Friends and loved ones, it is time for all good people to act.

In spite of all our material blessings and this wonderful land and freedom to come and go and privacy and civil rights as long as we conform and don't rock the boat, we are now a nation with a man -- two men -- who are determined to defy the will of the majority and usurp more and more power and privilege and secrecy, imperiling this nation. We are fast approaching a dictatorship.

Gary Hart sums up the status quo well:

"The endless Iraq war is decreasingly about Iraq and increasingly about the U.S. Constitution.

"President Bush's decision to escalate the war, and to further Americanize it, is based on his flawed and dangerous theory of the 'unitary presidency,' a theory under which, once war is declared, the president as commander in chief can ignore constitutional checks and balances, disregard the bill of rights, suspend accountability, and concentrate dictatorial power in his own hands."

[Huffington Post, 1.9.2007]

We can act as individual citizens to initiate the impeachment of George W. Bush. I have decided to do just that. The means is laid out in this link. Please explore this option. I am as serious as I can be. I implore you: please consider this action. Read all of the procedure and the arguments for and against impeachment. Then act.

You can make an individual petition yourself. All that is involved is downloading, printing, and filling out the form and mailing it to Nancy Pelosi. Even if there were a great deal more involved than this simple procedure, I am convinced that it is the just, honorable, sane, and moral thing to do.

And urgent. We need to do it now. We can hang out and pretend that initiating impeachment is something reserved for the lunatic fringe, for Cindy Sheehan (I don't believe Cindy, who lost a son in Iraq, is crazy, but Fox and Friends have said she was) and Michael Moore (yep -- he's fat and needs a shave, but he's right on this one), for the lady with the frivolous sign at the rally, for celebrities who are not making asses of themselves otherwise.

But I say the situation has gone much further than that. Senator Ted Kennedy gave a speech yesterday at the National Press Club about a bill he is introducing "to reclaim the rightful role of Congress and the people’s right to a full voice in the President’s plan to send more troops to Iraq."

In the speech, Ted read quotations which he had to identify as those of Lyndon Johnson because they were indistinguishable from the remarks of Bush. "We shall stay the course" is not original. Ted said that "Iraq is Bush's Vietnam."

Now, that Vietnam. I didn't go there, thank God, but I was here and aware of what was going on. I had completed my Army Reserve obligation by the time of the first big escalation, and was already crazy enough from my Peace Corps experience! But I was here, and I soon began to oppose it. I was a lefty and a peacenik and a hippie (without the appearance of one), so I was in the vanguard. It was a long, long time before the rank and file opposed it, before we finally concluded that over 58,000 American lives weren't worth it.

And of course there are those who have never come to the decades-later conclusion of Robert McNamara, the Donald Rumsfeld of that day, that "We were wrong."

Does anybody recall the sojourn in hell that we spent here and there in Vietnam? And how long it took us to get out of there?

JFK started sending "military advisers" there soon after he took office. (We young men wore flat-tops then and there was a universal draft.) Then there was the "Gulf of Tonkin resolution" that LBJ used in 1964 as his casus belli (think of Colin Powell's "aluminum tubes" speech at the UN). Then LBJ chose to quit after his term because of the unpopularity of the war in 1968.

Tricky Dick said, "I have a [secret] plan for ending the war" and people bought it enough without reading the fine print to squeak him into the White House. Then, whatever the plan was, it didn't materialize for the next six years and, while the brilliant Henry K. was "shuttling" here and there pursuing "peace with honor," we started [secretly] bombing Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam.

And after Nixon resigned in 1974, we still didn't rescue the last American in Vietnam via helicopter until 1975, during the Ford administration. So we were there for a good twelve years, with strong opposition from I'd say 1967 on.

And the kids then were opposed to the damned war. There was none of this YouTube and iPods and laptops for everybody and what is Britney Spears doing and that kind of crap. These kids were taking it personally. In 1971, four of them were actually shot to death by soldiers at Kent State -- that's a state college, where freedom of speech is supposed to be championed, not punished by death -- for demonstrating against the war. The kids then were beginning to think it was just as dangerous to oppose the war here as it was to fight it there. And the parents finally climbed on board with the kids, after the Kent State stunt.

In spite of all that, we were there twelve years and lost over 58,00 lives. How long is it going to be for Iraq? Four years and 3,000 and counting. Don't forget the billion a week we spend there. Act, friends. For the love of God and America and your loved ones, act.