I’m getting a funny feeling that Bush’s Watergate has begun.
“Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. He portrayed the president’s actions as “Nixonian stonewalling.”
His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said Bush’s assertion of executive privilege was “unprecedented in its breadth and scope” and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”
The Democrats may not have wanted to go down the impeachment road, but their hands may be forced. There seems to be a growing consensus that something must be done. And, since no one wants to make Dick Cheney the president, we are seeing a scorched earth campaign against Bush’s quail-hunting sidekick.
Signs are everywhere. Sally Quinn suggesting that John Warner have a Goldwateresque talk with Cheney. Dick Lugar and George Voinovich jumping ship on Iraq. The Washington Post doing a four-part expose on the vice-president. And, now, a full-blown constitutional crisis over executive privilege in both the Oval Office and the OVP. Even Orrin Hatch voted for some of these subpoenas.
Of course, none of this will accomplish anything if the Republicans aren’t willing to threaten to impeach the vice-president.
In my opinion, the administration has never had any alternative but to stonewall because they have committed offenses that would so outrage the public if they were known, that impeachment would be a slam-dunk.
But their wanton obstruction of justice might not be enough to outrage the public and force the Republicans’ hands. It’s time to get our shoulders up against this wall of secrecy and start pushing.
AG
In the early ’70s during the Watergate exposure, we had a mainstream press that at least sometimes understood and performed it’s adversarial role as far as not being stenographers for the government line.
We do not have a press like thast today, not even close. With this in mind, I have no confidence that either Bush or anyone in his gang will be called to account during their tenure. Bush will run out the clock and end his term as the abject failure he is.
Neither the press nor more than a few members of congress will really go after them; not the NYT, not the Dem leadership, and certainly not Repubs.
Well, the Washington Post is certainly going after them. Even David Broder is going after Cheney today. While Broder still can’t bring himself to say Cheney has broken the law or done anything unconstitutional, he is basically saying that Cheney is the worst VP ever.
They’re paying lip service to going after them, but, as is all too clear from the patterns revealed over these last 6 years, there’s no follow through. And, as a side note, look how many bylines that BushCo stooge Michael Gordon is getting lately in the NYT. This alone is a sure sign to me that the corporate press wants war to continue because it’s good for their bottom line, and that they will continue to support the warmongers even while paying their lip service to the opposition.
It’s sort of like the fact that Lugar and now Voinovich made a splash as though they opposed the Bush regime escalation policy and wanted to bring the soldiers home from Iraq sooner rather than later. Do you think either of these two jerks will sustain their opposition and follow through with meaningful pressure in Congress? I don’t!
Well, it’s not easy to predict.
I’m sensing something here.
I guess what I’m sensing is panic.
The panic is bipartisan, but it is infecting the GOP more strongly. They can’t raise any money, they can’t recruit any candidates, they are losing a generation of people in party affiliation. Alabama now as many self-identified Democrats as Republicans. Their ruling coalition is in shambles. Business just had their asses handed to them by social conservatives in this immigration bill. Any hope to win the White House is slipping away and they are facing a crushing defeat in the Senate elections, and probably another loss (though moderate) in the House.
Politicians can’t ignore these things.
And the foreign policy hands and military are panicked for their own reasons.
I think this time it is different.
Better for us all if you’re right about this and I’m not.
The real problem, as I see it, is that the Dem leadership is not different enough from the GOP as far as really standing up and vigorously and practically opposing the insanity of BushCo. Our disgraceful media is going to be attacking Dems whether they stand up for important things or not, and unless the Dem leadership effectively tells the media to go fuck themselves, even if we have a Dem ascend to the White House in ’08 I doubt the war will come to an end during that person’s term.
sbj, if one of the problems with modern politics (including the Dem leadership) is that they are too beholden to Beltway establishment opinion, then it becomes all the more significant when the matron of that culture, Sally Quinn, says it is time to axe the veep.
And it didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Dems unleashed the subpoenas, some Republicans voted with them. The WP did a hatchet job on Cheney. They’re running column after column against him. Even Broder.
This is what the long knives look like. Normally we get ass-clownery about poor, poor Casper Weinberger and poor poor Scooter Libby. Not right now, though. Right now we are seeing nothing but abuse.
Who would wield the axe that removes Cheney from government? Bush? Addington? Who amongst the Repubs in Congress would stand up to him and be able to compel him to see reason?
Nixon was a deeply disturbed, obsessed, repressed individual, a borderline psychopath. But he had at least a minimum capacity to see the handwriting on the wall and be responsive, finally, to the urgings of those around him to resign.
But Cheney’s mental illness eclipses that of Nixon by several orders of magnitude. He is, without question, a full-blown sociopath without the capacity to acknowledge that he is wrong about anything or that anyone else can have any authority over him. The very idea that he would resign for the good of the country or the good of the GOP is ludicrous. He doesn’t have the basic psychological capacity to even care about such things.
And, considering he’s running the Bush show, who’s going to dismiss him? Maybe if the Carlye Group gang, (Baker, Scowcroft, Odom, etc.), could seize control of Bush’s fragile brain then perhaps they could stand him up and order him to summarily can Cheney, but I don’t see that dynamic playing out.
Finally, I don’t see Cheney stepping aside for any reason, even real health reasons, at least until his insane dream of bombing Iran actually begins to happen, and I don’t foresee even that happening, if it happens at all, at least until the very last month or so before the ’08 elections.
No I think Cheney/Bush are just going to run out the clock on their criminal enterprise, and despite all the posturing by others no real pressure will effectively change the sick dynamics at the heart of this lunatic regime.
Bush cannot fire Cheney.
I agree with you BooMan. The tide is turning. As bad as it seems from our perspective, I cannot give up hope. EVERYTHING is changing. States are implementing the things their citizens want (see here and here).
If you believe, like I do, in the American Democratic System, you have to believe that unconstitutional behavior will not be accepted, and not just by progressives, or liberals, but republicans, and centrists, and ANYONE else. When this Nation WANTS to change, it does. It sure seems like it wants to right now.
essentially saying to the President of the United States that we don’t do torture is a mighty big shift.
It gives me reason for hope.
The way for this to happen is for the atmosphere for Republicans to become so toxic that they are willing to try and throw Cheney under the bus in order to save their own skins.
Without help from Senate Republicans, I don’t see this as accomplishing anything…
On the stonewalling. I think you hit the nail on the head (again) in noting that once they went down the road of unconstitutional acts, stone walling became the only alternative, since to admit it breaks the oath of office, and not to break it holds out the dim chance of political miracle. The same kind of logic forced the Nazi regime to fight it right to the end. After they murdering so many people in the ovens and elsewhere, they had no place to go. It’s called boxing onself into a corner.
This has all come about very quickly, a seeming grand confluence of bad news for our boys George and Dick.
I can’t help but wonder how the floodgates were opened, and by who. Sy Hersh has another article out (see ThinkProgress) where he talks about the boys’ ongoing obession with bombing Iran. Dick, according to Hersh, is once again ignoring the intelligence, and George is saying to anybody who’ll listen that he’s the modern-day incarnation of Churchill, and is going to be a hero in some nebulous future.
A month or two ago we were treated to a raft of articles that said both the pentagon and state were dead-set against bombing Iran (for reasons so obvious that it’s astounding they’d even have to ennumerate them), so could it be that this is a last-ditch attempt to keep Dick from doing one of his famous end-arounds and to keep the lid on the nukes?
Wish on, Boo.
Like all the OTHER Fitzmasses past, this one will fizzle.
The Dems don’t want it.
Business doesn’t want it.
And the Rats don’t want it.
Nope.
Not unless CheneyBush tries to impose some sort of martial law or other scheme to get the elections…the already fixed elections, as far as I am concerned…cancelled or “postponed”. And I do not believe that they COULD manage that, because the working parts of the CIA/Intel system (as opposed…and I do mean “opposed”…to the appointed/anointed suits at the top) and the working parts of the military (Ditto on that system as well.) would not support them.
So it’s going to be that old Chinese (w)oughta torture instead.
LAME DUCK TWISTING IN THE WIND.
Until such time as the string rots and the birds head back to their ranches for some much deserved rest and repatriation.
Sorry.
So it goes.
US Presidents don’t go to jail.
They just fly south for the nuclear winter.
AG