Enough is enough. What the fuck America? What does it take to get a lying, incompetent, treasonous president impeached around here these days??
I mean, jesus freakin’ buddha folks Clinton had a circus trying to get him outta office because he had the audacity to want a blow job outside of his marriage (ack! consensual sex between two adults, one of which is married and is frankly no ones business! call Ken Starr! Vincent Foster was murdered! Hillary is a man! Ack! The Republic is falling, the Republic is falling!).
Seriously. WTF?? Am I missing something here? Evidently I am, but really, is it that hard to get a goddamn GROUNDSWELL happening in the States that doesn’t have its roots in the Religious South these days?
I’m very disappointed and pissed off at you guys (not you personally, although who knows, the night is still young… 😉 for this nonsense & demand satisfaction on behalf of the rest of the planet… WE are suffering horribly as well for this administration and WE can’t do anything about it. It’s even more frustrating… so really, you have to help us out here…
Let’s recap one more time…
Downing Street Minutes ~ Illegal War ~ No bid contracts ~ Enron & the Energy Policy meetings ~ Florida 2000 & 2004, OH, PA, GA, etc. 2004 ~ Venezuela ~ John Bolton ~ Negroponte ~ Afganistan ~ Abu Ghraib ~ Gitmo ~ Patriot I & II ~ John Roberts ~ Terri Schaivo ~ Valerie Plame ~ ANWR ~ Drug “Wars” ~ Non existent WoT ~ Holy Fucking Shit I am getting sick of typing this list and now want to drive to DC and stand there and shout until I am hoarse and/ or people actually GET THE HELL OFF THEIR ASSES AND GO PROTEST THIS WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION THAT YOU CALL YOUR PRESIDENT.
Not just support of Cindy and a rightful demand for a meeting and answers; a concrete, serious and dedicated drive to set right a series of very, very agregious wrongs. Impeach them all. I don’t care about line of succession, send a message now and then take the elections in 2006 & 2008. Take a fucking stand. If Iraq was illegal you must Impeach. Whoever leaked Plame’s name must be brought to justice. If they are stealing from you and the country you must Impeach. If they are being barbarous in their treatment of human beings you must Impeach… okay, you get the picture, I’m just so sick of it already.
Please?
For serious. Please??
I’ll buy you all a cookie & cross the border again, I promise… 🙂
voting on the next colour of M&M’s than you can to sign a petition or protest for their democracy… 🙁
Oh well, this too shall pass… I’d just appreciate a bit more sense of urgency is all…
🙂
Happy Saturday!
As much as I’d like to see der shrub impeached I’m constrained to point out one little bit of reality:
If we get rid of Bush…
We have president Cheney.
Would you rather an incompetent sociopath or a competent psychopath?
Helluva note, ain’t it? Employment insurance of the evil kind.
Heh. Let the indictments fly, Stormkite.
Splinter/Stewart ’08 🙂
I see your reality and I raise you improper financial dealings (ie Haliburton & the Energy Task Force) & the outing of a CIA agent… let’s get those indictments happening at the same time! 🙂
One can always hope right…
> One can always hope right…
Well, so far that’s true…
but I don’t doubt somebody somewhere in an obscure office just off the Oval one there’s a GOP task force trying to find a way to make it a Gitmo’ing offense….
Problem with indictments and impeachments is you gotta go SO far down the chain to get past the invertebrates and the reptiles that there’s just not that many days left in the life of the Republic…
We have President Cheney now. That, in a nutshell, is why I don’t quit my volunteer jobs with other causes and jump on the impeachment bandwagon. Yes, by God, the whole lot of them should be impeached, and probably more than a few should be tried for other crimes and hanged for them, but getting the first impeachment borders on impossible, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.
We need to focus like a bloody laser beam on winning local and state elections — governors’ houses are where the bulk of presidents come from — and on winning back the national party. No matter how much Bush deserves to be impeached — or, for that matter, fed into a wood chipper — an electoral victory will count a thousand times more than a judicial proceeding. If Clinton had actually been expelled from office, it would not have delegitimized him in the eyes of his supporters, and Bush would be no different. He’s doing a great job of eroding his support even among his base, so I think we can afford to let him hang himself.
The crucial thing is making sure that our side is ready to put forward a viable progressive alternative when the Bush juggernaut grinds to a halt. If you want to worry about something, that’s it. And if congressional Democrats are all we have to throw at the GOP, we are badly fucked. We have got to get to work currying viable candidates from the states.
With a president as bad as Bush, the next election is ours to lose. I’d feel better about that if congressional Dems didn’t have such a strong track record of subverting the hopes of the party in pursuit of their presidential pipe dreams, but then, I’d feel worse about it if Democratic voters weren’t obviously getting sick and tired of the same old DLC pablum.
Either Bush is impeached because he deserves to be impeached or he isn’t impeached. This is no place for trying to play realpolitik games. Impeachment is not just about getting rid of a psychopath like Bush. It’s about reaffirming the standards of how the nation is governed. The process is more important than the result.
And practically speaking, even if Cheney did get to be prez without being indicted as a co-conspirator, he’d be one without credibility, without real power, without enough of a base to do anything Congress didn’t want him to do.
Sorry, Stormkite, but this frightened response kinda pisses me off. Bush has betrayed America and the world. He has to go or open treason in the White House will become the norm. The consequences are irrelevant.
Obviously, we disagree on this. I agree that impeaching Bush, Cheney, et al is a nice idea, BUT given that there’s absolutely NO freakin’ way the idea’s going to actually GO anywhere I see no point in spending time, energy, or effort on what will turn out to be yet another progressive windmill tilting excercise with accompanying circular-firing-squad debriefings and execution of the wounded and the insufficiently “ideologically pure.”
We haven’t got the energy, the credibility, the votes, or the time to waste on things that won’t go anywhere useful…
As to Cheney, you might want to consider that he and Congress are on the SAME SIDE…. arguing that he has no power without Congress is simply incoherent. He HAS Congress.
And, tell the truth, “the consequences are irrelevant” is absolutely and exactly the “mission from God” sort of thinking that the neocons indulge in… and I hear it from both sides often enough that it’s frequently difficult to decide whether government by the hard Right is necessarily any more dangerous, vile, or evil than government by the hard Left.
I just posted and then saw your response to Dave. You’ve written,
What are your thoughts on how to deal with the current admin? Are you suggesting that the energy be focused on the next election cycle instead of possible impeachment?
(btw, I’m interested in your thoughts … not trying to be snarky in any way.) :o)
In short, yes.
We need to focus, first and foremost, on getting the election PROCESS back under control. This, IMO, is the sine qua non. The floating quote from Stalin is very much applicable, and until we get back to fair and transparent elections, I don’t think it matters too terribly much WHICH of the various psychopaths, sociopaths, and assorted random lunatics parks his angry white ass in which chairs in DC. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Delay, Rumsfeld… basically they’re interchangeable, and rather than try to rearrange the nametags, we need to concentrate on establishing once again that they’re OUR chairs….
Look at the succession list at Wikipedia
and tell me where you see a human being? MAYBE Mineta, #14 (actually 12 since two above him aren’t eligible) who’s made a few almost-intelligent comments now and then… but just how freakin’ much time and energy do we HAVE to spend on this? How far down do you have to go before you realize this ain’t going anywhere useful?
Yeah, it’d be nice to make a statement on principle.. but we can make the EXACT SAME STATEMENT by forcing the system fixes through (and we might be able to do that since there are still a few old-line Republicans left who believe in the Constitution rather than PNAC) and then taking back everything in the next two cycles… without wasting enormous amounts of time and energy pushing the not-quite-nutcase right further.
Screw this “point of principle” crap. I want my freakin’ country back.
stormkite, you make a very good point. The last 2 elections were very damaging – both in terms of who was ‘victorious’ and for the democratic process in general. The changes required that you mention – fair, transparent etc. – are critical before the next cycle or we’ll end up with the same problems…
I think that trying to “get the electoral process back under control” is as much of a waste of effort as is an attempt at impeachment.
Kerry et al. didn’t lose because of electoral fraud, they lost because they didn’t get enough votes. Running against Bush, they should have had a 60:40 margin, not a 48.3:50.7 margin. Sure, there were electoral irregularities. But effort spent on trying to perfect a fundamentally imperfect system is not going to win elections.
There needs to be a Democratic message that gets 60% of the voters to vote for Democrats. All effort should be focussed on that point: A good message and good candidates for 2006. The election is less than fourteen months from now.
I agree… the 2000 and 2004 campaigns were, not to put too fine a point on it, LOUSY.
Gore could probably have won had he continued the approach he took at the convention, but he listened to the DLC…. and he doesn’t have the Elvis to overcome that mistake. Clinton did, Gore didn’t.
Kerry/Edwards and friends generally ran on the simple DLC-based argument that although they would if elected act more or less like Republicans, they weren’t…. and THAT had no chance from the start. Against Rove and the various dirty tricks artists, it was just flat out STUPID.
But the full Florida recounts show that Gore DID win Florida, just on votes cast, and in Ohio there were enough patterned and consistent variances from the exit polls and enough other irregularities that I’m not convinced that a straight election wouldn’t have gone the other way.
There’s enough evidence out there to make a convincing case that no matter HOW far apart the parties were, there were manipulations in hand designed to make sure the right person won.
In any case, we can never know.
IMO until the Dems show that they’re working to restore integrity to a broken process, they won’t be able to convince marginal or alienated voters that it matters for whom they vote or even whether. Hell, I have a hard time convincing MYSELF that it matters… and I’ve always been a politically opinionated critter in my private life. (Publicly, I take pictures, not sides, because I really DO believe that if you give people honest info and an honest process the good guys win more often than not…)
And the other part of this is that unless and until there IS a way to actually restore that integrity, to install and maintain an open, transparent, bi- or non-partisan process with appropriate audit trails, it’s my honest belief that the last Democrat who will ever be elected to any position higher than small-town mayor in this republic is currently in office.
On the other paw there’s also the fact that the balance between factions in the politically active voter base is within single percentage points either way… and THAT gets to the base problem, which is that no matter how we slice and dice the numbers, roughly half the voting population agrees, with varying intensity, with what the neos are doing. They might be swayed by a sharp jolt of truth, but most of them aren’t interested in that truth, and I don’t think many are willing to hear it.
The GOP has an advantage here. They’re fundamentally much more hierarchal than the Dems are, more committed to one single goal, and it’s always easier to motivate by fear than by hope… so their base turnout is and will remain higher for a while.
The activist Dem base (a small but significant portion of the larger party) isn’t really process-oriented to as great an extent, being more of the fundamentally anarchic “If I can’t vote for someone I like, I’ll just stay home” variety. This hurts them, because the majority of the body politic isn’t radical, and isn’t going to be. Whether we like realpolitik or not, the United States is basically center-right, and a solid candidate who’s acceptable to the progressives and the left will, at the moment, be much more likely to alienate the center than to win it over. But the Dems cannot win without the center — the base 40% isn’t cohesive or loyal enough to the idea.
Look at the number of people, just in Blogistan, who are vacillating about whether to work with a party that’s going a few degrees off the course they’d like it to take, or whether to leave and start a third or fifth or seventeenth party, or whether to try to take over the Democratic structure and force it back to the path they want it to take.
I’m not sure, given the recent history of the Democrats, that there exists the potential for a Democratic message that gets 60% of the population to vote for Democrats. I think with a combination of a decent message, (meaning more than “Not Bush”) candidates, AND an open commitment to, if nothing else, making the system fair again (which I don’t expect the GOP will match, given their current numbers and trends) they can get back a significant number of alienated and indifferent voters… enough to pick up seats and perhaps some real clout in 2006.
But that can only do that if there is a system in which the candidate who gets the most votes wins, and, just at the moment, there isn’t one.
you won’t get it by hoping some nice Republicans will let you have clean elections. You’ll get it by indicting the GOP and its leaders in the most public, publicity-getting way there is: the impeachment process.
I really don’t understand what you think the downside is. Energy? What energy? Energy is not something you store up and then spend like rice. It grows when there’s more energy out there. Do you really think more bitching about the PROCESS is going to get some energy going?
I guess where we disagree most is that you seem to think Republicans are just misled, and are going to come to reason and light if enough wonks drone on about clean elections and paper trails. I think the only practical goal at this point is to seek total destruction of the GOP as a politically potent force. They’ve gone way too far, and short of armed revolution, impeachment is the only way I can see to take the country back. Your posts really discourage me from even caring about the Dem party anymore.
On a level higher than punishment imho. And maybe it’s semantics… Citizen’s demanding accountability to reaffirm the standards of how your nation is governed. Though I wouldn’t say that the consequences are irrelevant, but rather blame and punishment would be the (hopeful) outcome of the effort.
…Blog I read today.
I think this might be the right place…
It all seems so clear to me now…
I’d be ROFL, if I wasn’t as pissed as you. Believe me, I would do just about anything to impeach this man. I have had many fantasies about him going down in flames as The.Worst.President.Ever. I, too, am shocked and dismayed. What is wrong with people?!? How can they be so fucking blind!?!
I just can’t explain it. But, please remember that for the majority here, we hate the idiot and we are ashamed and at least a good percentage will stand up and say so, ala Camp Casey or the 2000 in Utah. There is hope for us yet, and you can count me in with the protesters!
Spent some time yesterday looking over the anti-war marches from 2003.
Wow! World wide! How much longer are we going to wait? Are we going to wait until Iran and Venezuela are on the table, being divided up?
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Recent post :: Green Irish and US JCS Dick Myers
Defence Minister Willie O’Dea today cancelled plans for a meeting with United States Joint Chief of Staff General Richard Myers.
Irish Peace Activists
Anti-war protesters had condemned the general’s visit to Dublin but a spokesman for the Department of Defence said the informal meeting would not now go ahead.
But anti-war protesters, who gathered at Defence Forces headquarters in Phoenix Park, said no representative of the Irish State should be meeting with a member of the US military.
“This suggests a very high level of collusion between the Irish State and the US military machine,” he said.
“With the news that troop numbers at Shannon have doubled it suggests that the Irish Government is increasing collusion with the US at a time when the US invasion of Iraq has never been more discredited.”
“It is deeply concerning and it is an affront to Irish neutrality and shows a very high degree of contempt to the views of the majority of Irish people.”
~~~
I’ve been wondering what I’ll wear around my neck (signs get heavy) when this American goes to D.C for the first time in their life. Not to look at the fall foliage, or to bask in the history but to demand an end and voice my anger that this administration is nothing but a regime of warmongering assholes who shouldn’t just be impeached… bring them ALL up on WAR CRIMES. Get the ALL the fuck out of office.
Thanks to you, I’ll use “Bush is THE WMD”
–available– that’s needed to operate a democratic form of government.
There is no “public square” where individuals or society have rights to speak, petition or debate. All our major gathering spaces are the private mass-media property of the top owners of the economy. Even worse, under our system, all the rights of citizenship are reserved solely for the owners.
Consequently the nation’s information infrastructure is owned by the rulers. Even leaving bias out of it, since this infrastructure is all run on the profit motive, pure neutral economics forbid using it to educate or inform the public on issues of any complexity.
Unless a way is found to establish some kind of democracy in our information systems and space, it wouldn’t matter now if we switched to parliamentary or other forms of government.
Downing Street Minutes ~ Illegal War ~ No bid contracts ~ Enron & the Energy Policy meetings ~ Florida 2000 & 2004, OH, PA, GA, etc. 2004
If you measure the awareness of the electorate, you’ll find that these issues don’t exist in a politically meaningful way.
Impeach him, we can’t even wear t-shirts that say that in some places. Like malls-which can either arrest or ask people to leave mall because they say it’s private property and they don’t want people offended by certain messages on t-shirts….what free speech?
You’re absolutely right that most of the electorate aren’t even aware of 99% of these issues..and once again when most people get their ‘news’ from the media it is the failure of the MSM to make the public aware of what is happening.
How to make people more aware is the big problem…and many people also simply don’t want to believe that any US president is a cold blooded liar and worse, much worse than that.
A primer on the republic (our form of government – note: it never was pure democracy!):
Groundswlls and private citizens don’t impeach the President. We can groundswell all we want, but he’s still got somewhere between 40% and 50% of the population who at minimum agree with him. No numbers showing how many want impeachment, but expect it to be around 30%. That just isn’t enough numbers to make any kind of groundswell. And even if we did, WE CAN’T IMPEACH HIM.
So. The House and Senate are responsible for impeachment. Who’s in control of the House and the Senate? Why, Republicans! Who will never, ever impeach a Republican president, no how, no way.
Could we investigate him and appoint an independent prosecutor a la Ken Starr? Sure, if we hadn’t worked with the Republicans to let the independent counsel laws expire in the wake of Lewinsky. In other words, we can’t.
I feel your pain; I’d love to see him impeached, too, but it just ain’t gonna happen.
Yeah, that’s the very sad and unfortunate reality. There will be no impeachment because the repugs are in control and as you say they simply won’t allow that to happen. No matter what else bushco might do in the next 3 years or how many more crimes may come to light. Unless the republicans want it, it won’t happen.
Maybe you could LIBERATE us Americans from the torturing, rape room justifiers who have WMDs and have used them on other countries in the past.
We’ll shower you with flowers and candy.
spiderleaf – how long has it been since you’ve crossed the border? I haven’t had the stomach for it in the last 6 months – that’s an all time record for me.
And I’ll announce it when I’m proclaimed King. Oops, sorry, wrong decade – that was Nixon….
Accountability!! The groundswell is there but as someone upthread stated there is nothing, no matter how big the groundswell gets we can do about it. I have written my senators and asked them to impeach. I saw the masses at Camp Casey this weekend. I also saw the Prowar idiots. There are alot of them that are still drinking the KoolAide folks. So do I want what you ask for? Hell Yeah! Am I doing all I can to stop the madness? Hell yeah! And I won’t stop fighting until these warmonging, war profiteering sobs are indicted and charged and made accountable for the mess they have made of our country. I think you will see people in the millions, seriously on Sept 24th in DC for the Impeach Bush Now rally. Maybe it is time to cross the border again. There are also marches on the same day in LA and San Francisco. Get to it people!!
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“I’m not meeting with that goddamned bitch,” Bush screamed at aides who suggested he meet with Cindy Sheehan, the war-protesting mother whose son died in Iraq. “She can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!”
President Bush flashes the bird,aides say he does a lot of these days.
Source :: CMAQ – Quebec
~~~
should really be the question, and as I read the comments, I’m sadly disapointed at the overall sound of defeat.
That’s the problem, in a nut shell.
Take just a pinch of that anger you express on the net, and take it and your ass out in the street, and scream it !!!
Or, set and bitch, and it WON’T change…that’s pretty much it…..
So the bottom line is, set and bitch, whine, moan, and pay the piper, or, get up, get out, and RAISE HELL…
see ya…I’m out rais’n hell, and voicing my opinion, DAILY.
sometimes you can’t wake a person without getting loud, particularly brain dead, boob tubed, complacent AMERICANS…
Hey there IP!
Good question of course… I do admit that if I still lived in the US of A I don’t know if I could go on with this “quasi-normal” life I lead… but being up here all I can do is keep sending articles down to my Yankee peeps, writing letters to the editors of the papers in Toronto, I’ve sent Juan Cole’s stuff to the Editorial Page Editor of the Toronto Star & gotten a very nice reply… but that’s ultimately the problem with being in Canada… most everyone agrees with me… at least in Ontario, BC & Quebec… so I’m preaching to the choir… so Yankee peeps it is, donating to charities, writing when I’m not pursuing my demise in the capitalist ad world, marching in anti-war rallies and being an overall stylish & nice person 🙂
anyhoo, how ya been?
I sent your two wolves within piece to a few of my friends and it impacted them greatly… I thank you once again for bringing that to us… the morality & peace tale has a life outside of us all really…
Good to see you man!
thanks for the compliment, and you deserve many as well, for this article.
Would’nt it be great if there were a switch somewhere we could flip, and bingo, they would wake up…oh well…
In the meantime, I’m glad you liked the diary, and as well your friends. That was it’s intent, to help ; )
peace be with you and yours always.