Antiwar Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has reminded George W. Bush in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that America is not a monarchy, and that contempt for the constitution, the Congress and the people may lead to impeachment.
Watch the vid over the fold.
I’d previously thought that the Democrats were probably not going to move to impeach (and I don’t think it’s imminent), and certainly Nancy Pelosi spent a lot of time and effort hosing down such talk before and after the midterms. But the congressional changeover has created its own dynamic, and the exercise of the oversight function, along with other events such as the Libby trial, has revealed such a culture of entrenched and casual illegality that the administration is starting to look more like a criminal cabal than a government and more tricky than Dick. With two high stakes fights – over the supplemental appropriation for the Iraq War and over the refusal of the White House to allow public and sworn testimony by aides such as Rove and Miers on the US attorneys matter – on top of all sorts of other evidence about the absolute contempt for the rule of law that has accumulated over the term, things are really hotting up. Perhaps some of this will be resolved in the Supreme Court, but you’d have to start wondering if impeachment isn’t facing Bush some time down the track. Politics be damned – the defence of the constitution has to be mounted against this abominable mob? We’ll see.
This chump, Chimpy the jungle boy is such a hucking fuckleberry, no decent far-right anarchist can defend the monstrosity any longer. So in spite of all the excellent adventures driving the last empire into the big muddy he gotta go. And Nancy gotta do the job on him.
Don’t you Ms PRESIDENT?
Impeachment means never having to say yr sorry.
Wow, those are some pretty strong words from a Republican.
Did you catch John Stewart’s debate with John Bolton last week about Bolton’s perception that the President always has a responsibility to govern for his base? Bolton spoke over the top of Stewart and came across, to me at least, as being quite arrogant and dissmisive of differing points of view. It’s well worth watching.
Oh, and by the way Kim, your YouTube embeddings aren’t working for me in IE7. I don’t know if it’s me or something to do with the way that you are embedding the videos. It only doesn’t work for me at LP.
IE7?!?!?!?!
Shame on you. You should be using a decent standards compliant browser like firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Pingothepenguin, I’m not sure that firefox is as standards compliant as they claim. Most coders out there have all sorts of issues with firefox’s weird implementation of CSS. I’m not saying IE7 is standard’s compliant, it surely isn’t. I actually use both depending on what I feel like on the day.
I just thought I should let Kim know because IE7 is used by a lot of people.
Kim, you said
That’s what I’ve been saying for the past few years about Mr Air-Guard-AWOL.
Go get ‘em Chuck!!!!
With approval ratings hovering around 30-33%, Bush is a toxic albatross to hang around the neck of every GOP nominee for 2008. His unpopularity amongst independent voters nearly matches that amongst Democrats, so all the GOP nominees have to run anti-Bush. At the same time they can’t alienate the dead enders in the base for whom Bush is still the towering commander codpiece in the GWOT.
Setting aside the small detail that he surely deserves impeaching, in political terms, why would the Dems pursue impeachment and be done with him cleanly in 2007, rather than leaving the carcass of his presidency to sit in office and rot the GOP until November 2008?
That’s one view, and I guess it looks like it probably will turn out that way… trouble is, he/they can continue fucking a lot of shit up all the way to 2009. Especially if rule-of-law does not trouble them.
I wouldn’t begin to try predicting what will actually happen. Still, as someone said somewhere, Bush is starting to trample on his own Republican representatives’ turf and interests now. Not a good look.
Mick,
John Stewart’s post-Bolton analysis was priceless. In response to Bolton’s claim that because George Bush was elected (actually he wasn’t) he has the right to stack his cabinet with like minded nutjobs.
“So apparently the President now only represents the people who voted for him, and the rest of us can go and dip our balls in hot lava”
That the Dems havn’t brought impeachment proceeding against these crooks is unbeleiveable, they are truly spineless.
mick, it works on my home computer in IE but not on a work network. Maybe it’s been blocked. All I did was paste in the code from YouTube, so I’m suspecting it’s not the browser.
I’m having the same problem with IE7 and YouTube on this site as well, Firefox and Opera are ok.
There must be some problem with the code on wordpress or similar.
Well, on April 28th, there will be impeachment protests in towns and cities all over the country. And everywhere people will be using signs, their bodies, chalk, or anything else they can think of to spell out IMPEACH! Several cities have actions planned already, but we invite everybody to start thinking about the most creative, spectacular, beautiful, and clever ways they can come up with to spell it out. This is a spin-off of the BeachImpeach project on the shores of San Francisco where over 1,100 people spelled out “Impeach!” Find out what is going on in your town, or start your own project. Be a part of history and this media grabbing call to defend our Constitution through impeachment.
Find the pre-existing events here
Start your own action
Find out more about april 28th
Impeach Bush Resources
Monarchy in the USA! A band whose time has come at last.
Carl, you said
That failure to impeach is the one thing that will really harm the Democrats.
So where is the third force in U.S. politics? A pro-Constitution, anti-monarchist, anti-tyrrany party?
I would really love to know Graham, there hasn’t been an effective third force in US politics Since Strom Thurmmond ran for President on a pro-segregationist platform in 1948 (?)
I really would like to know what there problem is, dozens of constitutional lawyers have already laid out the case for them, they would have the support of at least every Democratic voter in the country, despite this widespread support the possibility of impeachment is mentioned rarely in the media, even here, if they do try to impeach it will be big victory for the blogosphere and grass roots political movements in general, because they would have had absolutely no support from big media.
But what’s stopping them? Some people have suggested its because they are scared of the Republicans dragging up dirt on them (lack of balls) or that maybe they even have an agreement with the White House to keep a lid on everything (therefore being no better the Republicans)
Anyhow, the failure to impeach will be a massive blow to the American Republic, because the next crooked administration that comes along will know that they can get away with it too. (sigh)
Perot in 92 took a much larger percentage of the vote than Thurmond, as did Wallace in 68. Anderson, a liberal Republican, got around 7% in 80.
You could make a case that Perot swung the 92 election by taking votes off Bush I which wouldn’t have gone the whole way to Clinton.
Thanks for clearing that up Mark, but is it true that Thurmmond was the last third party candidate to actually win a state? (South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama)
Nope, Carl, Wallace took 6 states in 68 for a total of 48 electoral votes – all Southern states.
See the map at the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ElectoralCollege1968-Large.png