Impeachment of Bush gaining advocates

Daniel Ellsberg, who did the nation a great favor by leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press, proposes an even greater favor to the country: impeachment of President Bush.

“If you want to move Bush on Iraq, get serious about impeachment,” Ellsberg says.

The impeachment idea is catching on despite burial of the stories by the obsequious media and the cowardly Democrats controlling Congress.

The Democratic Party of California is demanding impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. So is Lawrence Wilkerson, former State Department chief of staff. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, the best Democrat running for president, urges impeachment of Cheney. The reasons are powerful:

• Falsifying intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

• Claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

• Declaring falsely that Iraq was a threat to America.

• Seeing mushroom clouds that falsely raised the fear factor.

• Linking Saddam Hussein fraudulently with al-Qaida.

• Torturing and outsourcing torture.

• Wiretapping citizens without a warrant.

• Denying the sacred habeus corpus.

• Politicizing every agency and department while ignoring the good of most people.

• Outing a CIA agent.

• Abusing laws passed by Congress by issuing signing statements that King Bush can decide what the laws mean.

California Sen. Hiram Johnson spoke in 1919 about U.S. intervention in the Russian Revolution, calling it the criminal policy it was : “We have engaged in a miserable misadventure…setting at naught our promises. We…suffer the odium and infamy of (the world)…We have sacrificed our own blood to no purpose and into American homes have brought sorrow and suffering. Bring the boys home from Russia.”

Substitute Iraq for Russia and soldiers for boys and the speech is valid today.

Bush has mandated a war that requires no sacrifice except for the parents and loved ones whose sons and daughters are dying or being mutilated. The Army is stretched so thin that soldiers face multiple and extended tours. The price in lives and money soars: nearly 3,400 soldiers, $500 billion wasted. ($500 billion would provide 10 years of health insurance for every uncovered American.)

To Bush, ideology is everything, the good of the people nothing. He has absolutely no credibility about anything. He insists on what cartoonist Garry Trudeau in “Doonesbury” calls situational science, taking “both sides of scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts.”

George Tenet, former CIA director, now admits he remained silent while the neocons salivated over the war that they sought even before 9/11. Tenet, like Colin Powell, former secretary of state, should have resigned as a matter of principle and told the nation why. But few officials high or low have the courage to do so even if the American people pay the price of abominable policies.

If I were Dante, I would reserve the hottest place in Hades for people like Tenet and Powell who remain silent when they should protest.

Bush reeks with hypocrisy. He tears up the Constitution 364 days a year but has the chutzpah to speak on Law Day about celebrating “the Constitution and the laws that protect our rights and liberties.” He constantly pleads for Congress to support the troops. Yet conditions at veterans hospitals are appalling. Outpatient care is shoddy, with wounded patients often forced to care for one another.

Good U.S. attorneys are fired for political reasons. Politics, always politics, in the Bush administration. Ideology and politics abound in worker health, worker safety, drug safety, air pollution and even the General Services Administration.

Commentators are devastating. Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, rightly calls Bush a “clear and present danger to national security.” Bob Herbert, another Times columnist, cites “The emptiness of the administration’s moral landscape.” Frank Rich, fine essayist for the Times: “a presidency that is inclined to fictionalize almost everything…a divider not a uniter.” And syndicated columnist Robert Scheer: “The hanging of Saddam Hussein was an act of barbarity that makes a mockery of President Bush’s claim that it was ‘an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy.’ ”

A New Hampshire Republican, an ordinary citizen being courted for his vote in the 2008 presidential primary, is so right when he says America can never win in Iraq but it can stay there forever.

Bush is a woeful, sub-sub-mediocre man. What T.S. Eliot would call a hollow man, a stuffed man. Bush has been a consummate tragedy for America and the world. He has botched every job he ever had, the presidency the worst of all. He and the gruesome Cheney should be impeached.