Impish Impeachment Questions

The Office of the Executive has grown even more contemptuous in recent days, with Bush claiming executive privilege to avoid answering a subpoena, Cheney arguing that he's not part of the executive branch, and therefore allowed to avoid NARA requests for classified intel and, most recently, President Bush commuting Scooter Libby's sentence after he failed to make appeal. This is on top of the Military Commissions Act, various deceptions about the war in Iraq, and other crimes.

So why haven't the Democrats started impeachment proceedings?

(1) Political cowardice - they're so in love with power for its own sake that they fear their tenuous hold on a few Congress seats will slip if they lift a finger in the air to object;

(2) Opportunism - Bush is on his way out anyway, and if precedent is set for the Executive to claim this kind of power, why not save it for Obama/Clinton/Edwards/whoever?

(3) Sympathy - they don't find anything wrong with what he's doing; they just wish he were a little more genteel about it. Like Clinton's overseas adventures in Somalia, or Reagan funnelling weapons to Saddam Hussein.

You tell us.

Surprise! It's An Empire!

The House passed a resolution last week condeming Iran's (fictitious) attempts to create nuclear weapons. Two Representatives voted against it: Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

Arthur Silber takes the opportunity to remind us that the U.S. is, in fact, an Empire:

And that, as they say, is the ball game. In this manner, the Democratic House concedes, sanctifies, and gives its nearly unanimous support to the major propaganda point of the Bush-Cheney-Israel drive to war with Iran.

Thank God the Democrats took back Congress. That's all I can say. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened! Why, we might be on our way to a nuclear world war!

[...]

Kucinich does make one serious mistake in his comments, when he says, "The United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with Iran." C'mon, Dennis. The United States has a long history of aggressive war -- the Spanish-American War and the Philippines occupation, Vietnam, numerous covert operations all over the world (including endless such operations in the Middle East ever since World War II), the Clinton interventions of the 1990s -- on top of which, every leading national politician, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, agitates endlessly for confrontation with Iran. There is nothing remotely "unwitting" about any of this. Endless wars and unceasing slaughter didn't just "happen" while we were minding our business elsewhere. We believe we are entitled to world hegemony. It is our destiny to rule the world. We will have our way. "Unwitting"? Please.

[...]

Of course, if the Democrats actually disagreed, there are a number of actions they could take. But they do not disagree, so they won't take those actions. In the same way, there are a number of actions leading liberal and progressive bloggers could take in an effort to get Democrats to at least try to prevent Armageddon. But they have done next to nothing, other than endlessly blather about how awful it would all be (with nary a mention of the invaluable aid to the Bush-Cheney-Israel war program now provided by the Democrats themselves), and there is no indication they ever will. So I say again that, if the worst should happen, I don't want to hear a single goddamned word from any of these people.

In case anyone ever asks you why you don't vote Democrat if you hate Bush so much, link 'em here and tell 'em why.

Where are the Anti-War Candidates?

Thoreau gives us pause:

I don’t have the energy to blog [the Republican candidates' debate] play by play, and I guess it doesn’t matter because no pro-war candidate will win next November if US troops are still dying in Iraq.

To which we respond:

We disagree. Taking as read that one of the current candidates (Dem or GOP) must win, and that Ron Paul or Gravel will not be the nominees, then, almost tautologically, a pro-war candidate will win the election.

Who are the anti-war candidates in either party? Ron Paul was the lone Republican against the war last night. So there's no anti-war candidate on the GOP side.

On the Democrat side, Barack Obama wants troops in Congo, Darfur and wants to do to Charles Taylor the bang-up job the U.S. did to Saddam Hussein. Senator Clinton is wants "no option off the table" when it comes to dealing with Iran, a country with no aircraft carriers and no nuclear arms capability. Joe Biden wants more troops in Afghanistan and a no-fly zone over Darfur. Bill Richardson has the same tired speech every Democrat candidate has: our wasteful imperialist adventurism in Iraq has distracted us from the real imperialist adventurism in Iran and North Korea, etc. And John Edwards isn't going to win, so we didn't bother looking him up.

Seriously - where are the anti-war candidates? Where are the candidates who oppose nation-building, "all options on the table" and pre-emptive strikes? Where are the isolationists? Where are the candidates who would declare, as President Clinton declared over a decade ago re: Haiti, that the United States is "not the world's policeman"?

Looks Like Them Duke Boys Are Up To Their Old Tricks Again

Our man Ioz has been fighting the thankless fight, trumpeting for months now that the Democrats are not America's anti-war party. The actions of Democratic leadership before the Iraq civil war, during the Iraq civil war and now, in the failing days of the Iraq civil war, indicate nothing but a conflicted desire to distance themselves from the war's executors while embracing Middle Eastern war further.

How can we say this? Because the Democrats want to go to war with Iran:

Iran's intransigence demands a firm response from the international community, not just the United States. Make no mistake: keeping the lid on nuclear proliferation, stopping terrorist attacks on U.N. member states, responding to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic threats to destroy Israel -- these are matters of collective security.

What nuclear proliferation? What terrorist attacks? And what plausible apocalyptic threats?

[We'd like] effective diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force, which the United States must supply as a substitute for what will otherwise be a perpetually on-the-brink-of-war conflict between Israel and Iran, alongside the possibility of growing rivalry between Tehran and Sunni Arab states.

The "credible threat of force" is the growing carrier group stationed in the Persian Gulf. The "effective diplomacy" is ... um ... well, what do you say to a regional power that's trying to meddle in the affairs of the same state that you're trying to meddle in?

America comes off looking like the podunk sheriff in this one, sweat glistening through his stubbled chin as he bellies up to your car window. If you jaunt through town with too big of a gun or too fast of a car, he'll do his best to rein you in patronizingly. "Whoa there, son - shootin' the bad'uns is our job. You just go home and lay that silly little head down." But if you keep giving him lip, he'll draw down on you and ask questions later. I swear, judge, I thought that wallet was a gun. I thought that water-filtration plant was a heavy-water uranium reactor. Me and my deputies and my posse and a few of my drinking buddies and the SWAT team just opened fire to defend ourselves in the line of duty.