Not all is lost in the online world dedicated to impeaching Bush. I see that Zzpat over at Bravehost.com is still keeping a light burning in the hopes that the criminal George W. Bush will be brought to justice. Zzpat’s Impeach Bush web site is “Dedicated to exposing the lies and impeachable offenses of George W. Bush.”
I admire that ongoing dedication. We’re here, burning the oil at darkest midnight along with you, reporting the news related to the effort to impeach Bush, and put him behind bars, where he belongs, whether that news is good or bad.
Lately, the bad is much stronger than the good. Ironically, the Democrats have done more to douse the idea of impeaching Bush than the Republicans ever could have done. Still we’ll remain on watch, with our eyes wide open.
Now, I know that Representative McKinney was voted out of office this year, and was not one of the most popular Democrats in Congress. So, fine, Democratic members of the House of Representatives may feel justified in not cosponsoring the McKinney articles of impeachment in particular.
Will no other Democrat offer such a resolution? No one?
Once upon a time, there existed a web site entitled Help Me Impeach Bush. It was hosted at www.helpmeimpeachbush.com
This evening, I found a link to the site. Sadly, it no longer exists.
What did the site owner conclude? That impeaching Bush is no longer important?
That seems to be a general conclusion in the month after the November 2006 congressional elections – that we can just sit down now, and run out the clock on the last two years of the presidency of George W. Bush…
…while he continues to imprison people without criminal charge… and spy on innocent Americans… and fight an illegal war.
Once, we linked to a web site called Impeach Bush Now, which was found at impeach-bush-now.org
When they said now, I guess they meant later, or maybe never. They just gave up, and shut down their shop. Now, if you go to visit that domain, you’ll find a filler generic web site that has been automatically generated, and includes such repulsive material as a link promising free articles written by Ann Coulter from the right wing resource site Human Events.
This is what happens when you give up the fight – it’s worse than just a subtraction of your efforts. In the place of your work to hold George W. Bush to account, advertisements for right wing radicals are erected.
We’ll no longer link to Impeach Bush Now. If you’re a member of a pro-impeachment group that would like a link, however, give us a holler.
I’ve spent the last six years thinking that the Democrats in Congress were collaborating with the Republicans only because they weren’t in power, and thus didn’t have the power to do what’s right, and stand up to the Republican right wing agenda. I’m starting to see that I was wrong, and that the Democrats’ wimpy demeanor was genuine expression of their political identity all along.
Now that they’ve been elected to majority control of Congress, the Democrats are falling all over themselves to show that they won’t stand up to the Republicans. Witness Congressman Charles Rangel, who declared this weekend, “We don’t want really a fight with the president. What we want to do is to prove we can govern for the next two years.”
The Democrats don’t want to fight George W. Bush? What the hell do they think that they were elected to do, to have tea parties with the Republicans?
What is the use of having the Democrats in power in Congress if they aren’t willing to fight a President gone out of control? What does balance of power mean if they won’t stop a President who has openly flouted the basic laws of war that have been legally binding in the United States? What good are the Democrats if they are willing to allow the President to remain above the law?
When the President of the United States is throwing people into prison without criminal charge and torturing them, taking away habeas corpus, and spying on peaceful, law-abiding Americans who dare to be political dissidents, impeachment is not a radical option. The truly radical choice in this situation is to refuse to impeach the President, as the Democrats in Congress have done.
Once upon a time, impeachment activists said that if only we could re-elect a Democratic majority to Congress, then we’d see some accountability and oversight of the Bush Administration. Now, we see that the new Democratic leadership of Congress is declaring that they just plain refuse to consider impeaching President Bush, no matter what crimes he has committed. The Democrats in Congress are saying that, mostly, they don’t want to bother investigating what crimes and abuses George W. Bush has committed in the past. They just want to talk about the future.
In other words, the Democrats in Congress don’t want to take any strong actions that could jeopardize their re-election. Accountability and oversight are being sacrificed for the sake of power.
So, in November 2006, we are faced with the surprising situation of having to struggle against the Democratic leadership in Congress, and attempt to create a grassroots effort to convince members of Congress, one by one, that it is their duty to work to impeach Bush.
The time for accountability is running short, but such a grassroots network is beginning to form. Over at Democrats.com, there’s a list of people in in 58 congressional districts across the country who are willing to form the kernels of grassroots lobbying groups dedicated to persuading members of Congress representing those districts to stand for impeachment.
I love the irony of an organization that promotes unity and loyalty to the Democratic Party realizing that it has to confront Democrats and try to compel them to support the values that Democratic voters believe in. At least, however, they are giving it a try, and not abandoning impeachment. Good for them for that.
The irony of the threat posed by the new Democratic majority in Congress to the movement to impeach President Bush has not been lost on many bloggers.
Soldatensender laments, “Bush is the most impeachable president in American history. However, the incoming Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has declared impeachment to be “off the table.” Obviously, this means that Bush will not be held accountable and that the Bill of Rights is a casualty of the vague, undefined, and propagandistic war on terror.”
Getting a little bit out of control, All About Anarchy on MySpace has an annoying guitar screech, and then articles of impeachment, saying that we ought to “go to” them and “vote for” them. All about anarchy? In one spot? That isn’t very anarchic, is it?
The Head On Radio Network links to the Guy James radio show discussion today about impeachment, and whether it’s a good idea for the Democrats. For the Democrats? Who cares if impeachment is good for the Democrats? Impeachment would be good for America! Isn’t that what matters?
The consequences of the paranoid worship of fear promoted by the Department of Homeland Security are this: Police are now electrocuting students for studying in school libraries without proper identification. You think I’m exaggerating? Watch the video you see below, which was captured by a witness with a cell phone video camera:
The student did nothing violent. He did not break the law. He was just trying to study in his own university’s library, when a security sweep of the library by armed police officers took place. There was no reason for the police officers to believe that any crimes were being committed in the library. No one had complained about any suspicious activity in the library. But, police officers started blustering through the library on the UCLA campus anyway, demanding that all students show them identification or be kicked out of the library.
The student you’ll hear screaming in pain in this video, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, refused to show his ID, because he didn’t believe that the police had the legal right to search him without cause. So, the police told him to leave. Tabatabainejad gathered his things into his backpack and was walking toward the exit, but the police followed him anyway, grabbed him, and started to electrocute him with a taser stun gun. The police electrocuted the student at least four or five times, even though Tabatabainejad did nothing violent.
Then, the police threatened other students who were witnesses, telling them that they would be shocked with the stun gun if they didn’t leave the scene of the brutality.
All this took place because the police said that they needed to establish security… in a library where students were peacefully reading books and writing term papers. This is an all-too-telling example of what the paranoid terror of Homeland Security has done to America. The war on terror has promoted terror right here in the United States of America.
What will the new Democratic Congress do to stop this new reign of terror? So far, it looks as if they will do nothing.
