I still believe that the damage George Bush has done to Americans’ rights and freedoms far exceeds any good he’s done in protection Americans from further attacks. In part, that’s because I don’t believe there was a great chance of additional attacks on Americans in America – at least not for a long time after the 9/11 attacks and not many attacks nor much likelihood of success. In part I believe it’s because President Bush has caused harm to many more Americans by creating this war in Iraq and sending insufficient troops in with insufficient planning based on questionable intelligence (and that particular sentence is something that needs its own space for further discussion). Because I believe President Bush has harmed America more than served and protected America, I’ve been calling for impeachment for a long time, on this site and in my regular life when talking with others.
The whole federal prosecutors fiasco is causing more folks to talk about this, and some even have even written up why they believe this latest executive abuse will lead to impeachment in the near future. I’m not convinced it will happen – things still look to me like President Bush will complete his term in office – but I do like seeing more talk about this. Of course, the linked article is from a very liberal viewpoint, and a bit of the glee and edge could be removed to make the write-up better for me to point to, but I still think the view of this writer is at least worth reading, even if you disagree that President Bush should be impeached. I’m not sure I agree with everything said, but I think it does cover some important abuses, and I do believe more moderate or conservative politicians are going to start thinking about these same things.
About a year from now, pundits and instant historians will point back at the firing of the federal prosecutors and say, “That’s where the impeachment began.”
. . .
The attorney general takes an oath to uphold the constitution and execute the law. When controversial matters come up, his role, traditionally, is often to be the guy who says, “We can’t do that, it’s against the law.”
Gonzales took a different approach. He brought the ethics of a corporate lawyer to his office. He took it to be his job to find, or invent, a theory that would allow the administration to go forward. If the theory wouldn’t hold up in court, or made little sense, that didn’t matter. They could still maintain, with straight faces, that they believed what they were doing, on the advice of the attorney general, was legal and constitutional. If worst came to worst, they’d back off and move on, so long as the profit outweighed the penalty.
The most flagrant example is when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided they wanted to torture people.
The article is a bit long, but if you’ve spent much time reading my stuff, you should have no issues getting through the article’s length.
[tags]Blog talk on impeachment, Why impeachment will finally happen[/tags]