Geez. I take a few hours off to watch (again) Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and I find out that in my absence both Chris Bowers and Markos have unilaterallly disarmed. No to impeachment, they say…wouldn’t be prudent.
I’m going tell you right now that Chris Bowers has taken leave of his senses. To give you an example here is some of his reasoning:
Even if we had the votes for conviction, that means we would almost certainly have a veto proof congressional majority on the following policy areas: universal health care, revoking authorization to conduct the war, public financing of campaigns, renegotiating all of our trade agreements for better standards, passing complete energy independence legislation, and on and on and on. Now you tell me, if we had the ability to do all of these things, where would impeachment rank on the list of legislation that would actually help Americans? This is more or less exactly the response progressive caucus member Chaka Fattah gave to my ward when he spoke to us in October. Even if we had the votes to pursue this path, it would be better and far more important to pursue legislation that would actually help people.
This is probably the most fallacious argument I have ever seen Chris Bowers make. It’s truly awful. For example, faced with rock solid evidence that the controversial NSA programs, that were presented to Congress as merely warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists’ phone calls into the United States, were in fact much broader and included surveillance of reporters or political dissidents…do you really think that we couldn’t find 18 Republican Senators that would consider convicting and removing the President? But, under those same circumstances, do you think we would therefore ‘almost certainly have a veto proof congressional majority on the following policy areas: universal health care, revoking authorization to conduct the war, public financing of campaigns, renegotiating all of our trade agreements for better standards, passing complete energy independence legislation’?
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a totally incoherent argument based on an wholly invalid premise.
In fact, the only premise Chris makes which is valid is the following:
Congress should not start investigations already knowing how it wants the investigations to end. That is what Republicans did back when they retook Congress in 1994… We won’t be like them.
That’s right, we won’t be like them. We will have investigations (hopefully, if Congress doesn’t take the wrong lesson from Chris and Kos’s preemptive disarmament) and then we see where the evidence leads us. We will see what was going on with Dick Cheney’s energy task force, we will see what we can find out about the authorization of torture, we will look into Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, we will get access to the NSA programs, we will look into the Pentagon’s spying on Quaker peace activists, we’ll…ah hell, let’s just take from the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War:
In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the
Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled
Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq;
misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for
such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and
other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of
their Administration.There is a prima facie case that these actions by the President, Vice-President
and other members of the Bush Administration violated a number of federal laws,
including (1) Committing a Fraud against the United States; (2) Making False
Statements to Congress; (3) The War Powers Resolution; (4) Misuse of Government
Funds; (5) federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel,
inhuman, and degrading treatment; (6) federal laws concerning retaliating against
witnesses and other individuals; and (7) federal laws and regulations concerning
leaking and other misuse of intelligence.
And that is just the definitional stuff. You know the stuff that one side can say is a war crime and the other can say is no worse than fraternity hazing or minor arson. Where the rubber meets the road is in perjury and obstruction of justice, or in the administration refusing to provide evidence in defiance of Congressional AND Judicial subpoenas. When that shit starts happening, then you have a constitutional crisis even Jim Inhofe would have a hard time attributing to ‘mass delusion’.
Bowers goes on to cite poll numbers. Here’s some poll numbers for Chris:
Nixon 60.7%, 520 Electoral Votes
McGovern 37.5%, 17 Electoral Votes.
Jerome a Paris made the point rather succinctly:
…you think the world is not watching?
So Democrats also think it’s okay to go invade another country, to get several hundred thousand of its inhabitants killed, to proudly practice and promote torture around the world, to tear up the Geneva Conventions and a whole load of international treaties, and to go grab random foreigners around the world to put them in Guantanamo and throw away the key?
No, we don’t think it is okay. Chris Bowers definitely doesn’t think it is okay. Markos doesn’t think it is okay. I sure as hell know that Pelosi, Conyers, and Waxman don’t think it is okay. It’s just that some people don’t want to do a damn bit about it because it is divisive, or there isn’t enough time, or because they erroneously think that the Republicans will not gladly throw both Bush and Cheney under the bus (and distance themselve from the Mess o’ potamia) if they are faced with extensive evidence of malfeasance, perjury, obstruction of justice, official corruption, and contempt of Congress.
I love Chris but he’s just wrong on this one.
