Impeachment "lessons"

In an April 24th article entitled "Kucinich launches oust-Cheney effort," Tom Curry of MSNBC claims that "The Republicans proved in 1999 that impeachment is not a functional political tool, except perhaps in the case of corrupt federal judges (against whom it has been used a few times in the past 30 years). "

I'm growing quite tired of the impeachment naysayers (which, unfortunately, includes a lot of our congressional leadership) who, along with media analysts like Curry, keep spouting the received wisdom that impeachment is a bad idea, even if richly deserved by the thugs who comprise the decision-making core of the Bush administration.

The two arguments against impeachment seem to be that either (1) it is a political mistake (Curry's opinion) or that it would be (2) bad for the country.

Political Mistake
As to the first argument, it has 3 serious problems:
First, there is far too small a sample of US presidential impeachments to draw any conclusion about the political benfefits or drawbacks of impeachment. And, in fact, in parliamentary democracies, no-confidence votes and changes of government are common tools of all political parties and provide a mechanism for holding government accountable. There can certainly be political fallout, but the idea that it is always bad for those initiating the action is just not so.

Second, using the Clinton impeachment as a model for impeachments is completely unjustified. Clinton was impeached for having sex with Monica Lewinsky (though the excuse for the impeachment was that he lied under oath about it). To claim that there is any similarity between what Clinton did and what the Bush Administration has done is nonsense! As the bumper stickers quite reasonably point out, "When Clinton lied, nobody died." In contrast, the Bush Administration has engaged in a cold-blooded, calculated campaign of lying about multiple grave matters of state and at several levels of the administration and for several years.

Bush et al's lies have caused the US to invade a sovereign country, which has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands of Americans. It has de-stabilized the world oil market, leading to ruinous energy price increases that have hurt people worldwide in general and in America in particular, where high energy costs threaten our fragile economy and cause hardship for ordinary Americans.

Bush et al's machinations have done irreperable damage to the reputation of the USA with its allies and have provided fuel for decades of jihad-building hatred by our enemies -- and by people who didn't used to be our enemies.

Meanwhile, to enable the above, Bush's little gremlins have infiltrated the entire federal bureaucracy poisoning it with incompetence, cronyism and ill will. And his big gremlins have been working on trying to repeal the Bill of Rights and to nullify the Geneva Conventions!

Third, it is the duty of Congress to act as a brake on executive misconduct and, so far, it has done fuck-all (as the British would say). It doesn't matter what the political fallout of impeachment, Bush et al are guilty of high crimes and need to be called to account.

Bad for the Country

The second argument - is that our democracy will come tumbling down if we have an impeachment. (Funny how this argument didn't seem to bother the Republican partisans who pursued the Clinton impeachment with such a vengeance; apparently removing a president for a sexual peccadillo wouldn't ruin the country, but removing him for attempting to undermine the Constitution would. Hm, funny logic that).

I happen to think that our Constitution, our nation, and our people can tolerate action needed to bring crooks to account for their misdeeds. That's why our system includes the impeachment mechanism; it's not there as a pretty embellishment never to be used.

An impeachment in the USA is much rarer than a vote of no confidence in a parliamentary country and is therefore perhaps more frightening to us as Americans, but not, I submit, as frightening as allowing the thugs who run the Bush junta to consolidate their insidious power to such an extent that the USA may soon begin to resemble 1980s Argentina.