Even Worse Than Bush and Cheney

What's even worse than what Bush/Cheney have done is the fact that they have been allowed to get away with it. People need to pay close attention to this, analyze it and stop acting as if things are basically alright and that the rules of the game are the way they’ve always been. This government (and I speak here of the entire governing group, not just the criminals in the White House and the criminals at Fox News) is remaking and restructuring what it means to be an American and how America acts in the world. What was unthinkable a year ago or six months ago is now an accomplished fact.

While America has from the start been a country that wasn’t above torturing people (consider what was done to the Native Americans and to slaves and to Vietnamese in Operation Phoenix) – making it legal and official policy is a startling, ominous, momentous step.

Stripping people of habeas corpus rights is a startling, ominous, momentous step.

Spying on all Americans and being allowed to do so without any consequences is a startling, ominous, momentous step.

The Democrats have yet to challenge these policies. The Democratic Party leadership has yet to scarcely even mention these matters as important and urgent. The DLC continues to treat impeachment as unthinkable and the mass media continue to ignore the growing, majority cries for impeachment and/or treat impeachment talk as some kind of partisan vindictiveness.

The party that some people still think is our one and only hope doesn’t think that unjust, immoral wars that violate international law, that are based on blatant lies, and that are killing hundreds of thousands, probably a million at this point, should be defunded! No, according to Hillary Clinton, the only problem with the Iraq war is that it isn’t being handled competently! The only problem with Bush/Cheney’s threats against Iran, according to Barack Obama and John Edwards, including their plans to possibly use nukes, is … nothing!

People who oppose impeachment (and even some who support impeachment up to a point) think that some things have gone wrong and some things are bad, but they don’t realize the magnitude and the direction of events. They don’t see that the rumblings and small tremors under the ground on Mt. St. Helens are harbingers of an explosive eruption. They think that these tremblors are just tremblors and that they WON’T get any more severe BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T YET gotten more severe than what has already happened. If you treat every new outrage as an episode by itself and don't grasp the whole direction and trajectory of this process, you fail to understand what is actually going on and the deadly seriousness of it all. This is the kind of shortsightedness that led German Jews to keep telling themselves that the Nazis couldn’t be serious about their threats to Jews – after all, many of them thought, we’re as German as anyone else - and that the Nazis wouldn’t go any further. Every time the Nazis went another step further, these Jews in denial said to themselves, well, it can’t go any further than this and it can’t get any worse. Except that it did.

We start out ITP with the following list. It’s a good thing to review:

12 Reasons Why Bush and Cheney Must Be Impeached

1. Stealing the White House in 2000 and 2004 through outright voter fraud.

2. Lying to the American people and deliberately misleading Congress in order to invade Iraq.

3. Authorizing and directing the torture of thousands of captives, leading to death, extreme pain, disfigurements, and psychological trauma. Hiding prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross by deliberately not recording them as detainees and conducting rendition of hundreds of prisoners to “black sites” known for their routine torture of prisoners. Indefinitely detaining people and suspending habeas corpus rights.

4. Ordering free fire zones and authorizing the use of anti-personnel weapons in dense urban settings in Iraq leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians – war crimes under international law.

5. Usurping the American people’s right to know the truth about governmental actions through the systematic use of propaganda and overt disinformation.

6. Building an imperial presidency by issuing signing statements to laws passed by Congress that negate Congressional intent. Hiding government decisions from public and Congressional view through subverting the Freedom of Information Act. Illegally spying on millions of Americans without court authorization and lying about it for years.

7. Undermining New Orleans’ capacity to withstand a hurricane prior to Hurricane Katrina; allowing New Orleans’ destruction by Katrina; and failing to come to people’s aid in a timely fashion, leading to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Americans.

8. Denying global warming, disregarding peak oil, and placing oil industry profits over the long-term survival of the human race and the viability of the planet.

9. Violating the constitutional principle of separation of church and state through the interlinking of theocratic ideologies in the decision making process of the US government.

10. Failing to attempt to prevent the 9/11 attacks, despite a wealth of very specific evidence of a pending terrorist attack upon New York, and the World Trade Center in particular. Using this failure as a rationale for pre-emptive attacks on other countries and for the suspension of Americans’ fundamental civil liberties and our right to privacy.

11. Promotion of US global dominance of the world and the building and use of illegal weapons of mass destruction.

12. Overthrowing Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and installing a highly repressive regime.

Ask yourself: can a government such as this be allowed to stay in office one day longer?