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House Narrowly Avoids Having to Debate Impeachment of Cheney
An anonymous reader writes "Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) yesterday successfully moved articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney to the House Judiciary committee. 'Today's resolution from Kucinich (D-Ohio) was essentially the same as the legislation he introduced earlier this year, which included three articles of impeachment against Cheney based largely on allegations that he manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. The last article accuses Cheney of threatening "aggression" against Iran "absent any real threat."'"
Congress' approval rating is a meaningless metric. The approval rating of congress is almost always bad. It is rarely (if ever) higher than the president's. However, if you ask people about their particular senators and representatives, their ratings are generally much better. Remember, it is not my representative that is the problem -- just everyone else's.
Rhapsody in Numbers
"Any crazy person with rockets is a threat to me."
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have lots more missiles at their disposal than Iran's government, so.........
After having watched their performance for the last 7 years, I think their sanity is certainly an open question. George W. was also an alcoholic and drug abuser for most of his adult life which also calls in to question his stability. When you have two people who have done nothing positive for their entire reign, and almost single handedly turned America in to a globally hated and despised country you generally have to wonder....what were they thinking. Just observe the fact the U.S. dollar is plunging relative to most other currencies. Markets are ruthlessly efficient at finding truth and the plunging dollar indicates America has been officially run in to the ground by our fearless leaders.
Kucinich is kind of a space cadet sometimes but he was right on trying to get Cheney impeached first. You have to get him impeached before you can impeach Bush otherwise he would take over and President Cheney would be a nightmare come true.
Nope. Probably because they're the most useless Congress we've had in over a decade. They haven't done anything useful, they pulled a bait-and-switch on their arguments for why they should be elected last year. i.e. "Elect us and we'll get out of Iraq... oh, sorry, you voted for us but now you also need to give us the presidency. We couldn't do anything before and we still can't do anything."
No, the reason why Congress's approval ratings are so low is because they've shown the public what they have to offer, and they don't have anything. The Democrats should've tried to lose 2006 so they'd have a chance in 2008. In 2008, the Republicans have Bush dragging them down but Democrats have the Congress dragging them down even more. It's entirely possible the Democrats peaked in 2006 and won't be able to get the job done in 2008. By the time the election comes, they'll have had 2 years in Congress and nothing to show for it. Not a good way to go into a presidential election.
I think the congressional Democrat's numbers are low because they have completely failed to rein in the Bush administration, which is what the Democrats were put in power to do. They were installed to get America out of Iraq, instead there are more troops there now than there were during the election with no end in sight. The Democrats cry they don't have the votes to override a veto which is B.S. All the Democrats have to do is not allocate funds for Iraq which takes a simple majority and then the troops come home. That's why the founding fathers gave them the power of the purse.
Impeaching Cheney would have done nothing but improve the approval rating of Congressional Democrats. He is widely despised throughout the nation for having suckered the nation in to Iraq, and for promoting the use of torture which has turned America in to an outlaw nation.
Impeaching him for Iraq and Iran is off the mark. He should be impeached for:
A. single handedly pushing authorization for torture which was done entirely by his office and his aides
B. single handedly pushing authorization of illegal spying on American citizens without a warrant also lead out of his office
Those are both slam dunk grounds for impeachment because they are both clearly illegal, unpopular, unnecessary and were just plain stupid.
@de_machina
Please explain to me exactly *WHY* impeachment is not on the table. There have never been a President and Vice President of the United States *MORE* deserving of impeachment. The Vice President falsified an official intelligence report that was to become the basis of deciding whether or not to send this country to war, for crying out loud. The Vice President outed a CIA operative to settle a political score. The President has institutionalized the breaking of the Fourth Amendment on a massive scale and won't even let Congress, let alone the American people, have all the facts about what he's been doing. *NOT* impeaching them both has got to rank as one of the most gross miscarriages of justice in this nation's history.
Pelosi, Hoyer: GROW A PAIR! Stand up for what's right! Do your job and uphold the Constitution!
-----Chaz
Do we wait until they have nuclear tipped rockets that can reach the US? Do we do nothing until NY glows in the dark?
Maybe wait until there is actual proof these nations wish to launch rockets at the US/NATO.
If you are suggesting that the US strikes before there is an actual threat then what is to stop other countries doing the same?
North Korea will have to launch because the US is a threat, same for everyone else.
There IS an alternative to shoot first & invent evidence later.
The deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of our own troops maimed and killed is not technically Cheney's fault, in purely legal terms. Nor the fault of the administration who supported and executed the war. I just have one question for these technical excuses for the immoral conduct of our entire government: where exactly does the buck stop? Who has the integrity to accept responsibility for their actions?
They LIED about EVERY threat that Iraq and Saddam Hussein posed, and not only once and in government reports, but MULTIPLE times while addressing the public. The fact that they weren't under oath is actually more evidence that they knew they weren't just being vague or coy, but completely dishonest. Anyone who claims otherwise is as full of shit as they were/are.
"Do we wait until they have nuclear tipped rockets that can reach the US? Do we do nothing until NY glows in the dark?"
Damn, I thought it was sweeps month, and here I am getting reruns:
"Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." - G.W. Bush, 7 Oct 2002
Sorry, but I've been down this road before, and I didn't really buy it the first time. Iran could hypothetically have anti-matter planet busters, but the only way I'll believe it coming from this administration is if they take me personally on a tour of Iran and show them to me. That's the funny thing about credibility. Once it's shot, it's REALLY hard to get it back.
Ironically, I always believed Iran to be a more credible threat to US interests than Iraq anyway. I was never in favor of the Iraq war, but the right argument with solid evidence might have got me behind hitting Iran. But that ship has sailed, and I won't be getting on the next one.
Worrying about who would replace an impeached Bush is beside the point. The point is that Bush, Cheney, et. al. BROKE THE LAW. Repeatedly. The congress has a responsibility to impeach such behavior because failing to do so condones the illegal behavior. A terrible precedent has been made. A cabal can steal two presidential elections, trash the constitution, and start illegal agressive wars of conquest, and that's a-okay.
-- Democracy in America July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001 R I P
-- QED
Congress was elected with as clear a mandate as I have ever seen in 2006: end the Iraq war. All it would have taken would have been a simple majority against the funding bill in the House, or 40 senators to support a filibuster in the Senate. Instead we get a bunch of hand-wringing and poor excuses (lies) about supporting the troops. "Support the troops; keep them in the middle of a civil war with no chance of victory and don't give them even the basics they need." We need a new government here in the US, one that puts the people of this nation first, second, and third.
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
This article got tagged as "slashdotliberalwhining"? Are you fucking serious? Conservatives or liberal, you've got to be kidding if you don't think that George Bush and his administration has done more to damage this country than any president in your lifetime. No, seriously: forget about your pet cause, let go of the the party affiliation. Look at where we were five, ten, twenty years ago -- tell me where the improvements have been. By any measure, even conservative social goals, Bush and his administration have accomplished little if any good, and in every other area enormous bad. His approval rating is below what Nixon's was at the point of impeachment. And this article is "slashdotliberalwhining"? Get real.
I'm a moderate. I respect candidates from across the spectrum. George Bush and his administration have been a goddamn nightmare.
I don't care what your religious, political, or social affiliation is. If you don't recognize this administration as crap, you are in deep ignorance or denial.
I love this country. And I could cry over what these people have done to us.
It never ceases to amaze me that the USA (speaking as your northern neighbor) could possibly see states like Iran or North Korea or, even more laughable, Iraq, as a possible threat to the USA.
You guys stared down the USSR for the entirety of the cold war, facing an enemy with superior numbers and brutal methods who you were very much aware had nukes, and you got by just fine.
OK, they might get nukes, but so what? Lots of countries have nukes. If you wanna take bets on who's going to be the first country to actually _use_ them, my money's on Israel.
Look, the deal with the non-proliferation treaty goes like this. The countries that don't have nukes agree not to produce them, and those that do agree to gradually phase out their stockpiles.
If the US doesn't feel the need to rid themselves of nukes, why should Iran or anybody else feel the need to obey the Anti-Proliferation Treaty?
The country that has the dubious honor of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons on humans doesn't get to take the moral high ground and lecture Iran about their nuclear ambitions.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
My major problem is the question you didn't answer: What's the appropriate burden of proof for executing an unarmed person in the field or disappearing him to a prison site for the rest of his natural life? I'll accept for the sake of argument that these things are effective ways of dealing with the problem, but I'd like to see some serious rules applied before I give the nod to classifying somebody as a person with no rights, locking him up, and throwing away the key. So far, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that we're doing a good job of figuring out who we should be disappearing, and I've seen enough evidence that we aren't to be hesitant to give the government an "arbitrarily disappear, torture, and execute whoever you want as long as it's not me" card. When you combine death / permanent imprisonment with accusations and evidence that look like a scene out of The Crucible, I get nervous.
Hmmm... I think that we look at the world in a fundamentally different way, then. I tend to think that in all but the most extreme circumstances, it is universally wrong to deprive somebody of life or liberty without a way of meaningfully defending himself. To me, that principle isn't just a convenient legal fiction that happens to work out well for me. It's a fundamental concern about the unfairness of being kidnapped in the middle of the night and shipped off to be held incognito in the middle of nowhere until you die. Add to that the fact that it's bad PR at a time when we're losing a PR war to the types of people who blow up hospitals, and I think that you have the makings for a policy we'll be embarrassed about in the hindsight of history.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Right, because ignoring "other people's problems" worked so well for us in World War 2.
We didn't enter WWII for humanitarian reasons. We entered the war because Japan drew us in with a massive attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Up until that day in December 1941, there was a strong sense that the US should stay out of the war, because we remembered what happened in WWI. We were sending supplies to Britain, and providing other resources to our allies, but there was no support for declaring war on anyone.
When Japan made it clear that they intended to work with the other Axis powers to rule all of the world, there was no question that we needed to fight back, and so we did. The difference between WWII and all other conflicts since is huge. The Axis powers were clearly an existential threat to the continental US (Hawaii first, lower 48 next); unlike the theoretical threats embodied in "domino theory" and "global war on terror".
Sure, Al Qaeda did attack us, and we attacked back -- in Afghanistan. We were making some good progress there, too... Until the majority of our resources and attention were refocused on the Iraq boondoggle. Now look what's happening in Afghanistan: the Taliban is coming back, poppy/cannabis harvests are booming, and Afghanistan's neighbor Pakistan is having major problems due in no small part to the increasing influence of radical islamists who operate from the safety of the afghanistan/pakistan border.
The only entities that are benefitting from this Iraq shitstorm are Al Qaeda (it's a fucking recruiting wet dream) and the guys like Halliburton, Blackwater, and all the other Military-Industrial Complex hangers-on.
Feh.
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