(picture by Gary Zimmerman)Until recently, talk of ousting President George W. Bush has been very limited, coming mostly from radicals from the political left, groups supportive of anti-war causes (although some calls have come from members of the political right). For too long, impeachment has been deemed implausible. The arguments were that it would not happen with a Republican Congress, not with the president finishing his second term and certainly not while the country was at war.
But today impeachment isn't just a “looming carnival of the absurd”, a mirage in an uncertain horizon – it is a real possibility for 2007. The movement is growing louder by the day, creating a resonant echo that is rapidly taking root in public discourse. The issue was recently brought back to the spotlights by the March’s issue of Harper’s Magazine. “Impeach Him,” reads the cover of the magazine, with an essay by Lewis H. Lapham to the title “The Case for impeachment: why we can no longer afford George W. Bush”. According to Harper’s magazine, on December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment”. Despite the case of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, which was making news by then, the request faced nearly complete silence, attracting little or no attention in the press and television, only some applause from the left-wing blogs and heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. When raised the question as to what he had in mind, and who did he intend to address, the congressman answered: “To take away the excuse that we didn't know. So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask - Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress, when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government - none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that - somehow it escaped our notice - that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law”.
Also in a public forum in New York City recently, journalists, lawyers, and political figures came together to discuss the case against George W. Bush. In fact, the case for the impeachment of President Bush is arguably the strongest in American history, apparently even comparatively more powerful than the impeachment proceedings of Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) makes this amply clear in its recent book, a concise indictment of President Bush that lays out four clear legal arguments that point to impeachment as a necessary remedy for the gross violation of American Constitution. The Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush covers illegal wiretapping, torture, rendition, detention and the Iraq war. Even the Washington Post (claiming that "for some liberal pundits, it's payback time while for some conservative commentators, it's time for uncomfortable explanations") and the N.Y. Sun have brought out articles on the issue. However, some argue that this is not the right moment to go for impeachment, prefering to wait for a possible take over of the Congress by the Democrats, which would facilitate this at a later stage.
But it’s not only Bush that is being criticised, it’s all his team, whose misjudgments and mistakes have led to the deaths of thousands and a mess that continues three long years after Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others indicated that the war would be long done by now.
Read more on this issue at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/32977/
http://www.blogforamerica.com/archives/007626.html
http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000394.htm
http://impeachbushcoalition.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_to_impeach_George_W._Bush
http://www.bushlies.com/
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