Bush, Cheney: They May Ride Off Into The Sunset, The Gift Of A People Without Will, But They Will Be Followed By The Unforgiving With A Warrant
| |
Prepare to Impeach Obama If He Accepts Unconstitutional Powers
by Ralph Lopez
Yep, here's those Americans again, stubbornly clinging to their rights. Now they're really off the deep end, not only did the want to impeach Bush, now they want to prepare to impeach Obama. Obama has made come pretty good moves hinting at restoring the Constitution, but after the screwing they got from John Conyers and Nancy Complicit-in-Torture Pelosi, they are a leetle mite tired of talk of accountability for the Executive which goes nowhere.
The impeachers are saying that if Obama accepts the breathtakingly expanded executive powers being handed to him by Bush, then he should be impeached too. Obama is implicitly accepting the power to declare any American citizen an enemy combatant indefinitely, and the power to spy and snoop without a warrant. No dice, Barack.
Don't get me wrong, I kind of like Barack. I can see what his own party is already doing to him, it's a "Jimmy Carter" again. They are balking at a part of his tax proposal which is really rather uncontroversial. It's the $3000 tax deduction for companies which hire or retrain workers. Boy, that was a quick honeymoon. Can you imagine Republicans stepping out of line like that before their golden boy even took office? Their offices would suddenly be in the part of the basement where you could hear toilets flushing.
$750 billion bailout for banks' shady speculation? No problem. A few crumbs to retrain workers? Unthinkable. John Kerry said he had better ideas for how to create jobs, that he didn't think this would work. The rub is, since they don't get the tax break unless the jobs are created or workers are retrained, why wouldn't you let Obama try? It's the start of a "Jimmy Carter." See, Tip O'Neill, Robert Byrd, and Ted Kennedy made the hick from Georgia's life hell, from his own party. Carter was not an insider and so it was planned that his would be a "failed" presidency. The very first thing they shot down during his non-existent honeymoon was a little plan to start us on the path of energy independence. The plan which might have weaned us from corrupt royal families who kept the oil fix coming, which wound up creating people like bin Laden. Thanks guys.
Jimmy was almost always right. But almost every one of his initiatives was savaged mercilessly by his own party, until he was a one-termer for sure.
But back to impeaching Obama. It's not that I don't trust him with the new Executive powers toolkit being handed to him by Bush. It's that I don't want him to pass it on to the next guy. God forbid a fascist bastard like Jeb Bush, who'll make his brother look moderate, get ahold of where George left off and take it from there. A couple of terror attacks and he'll have a grip on the country Hitler could only dream of. He'll have the technology, and be all of Bush's amorality plus some brains. Now that's scary.
I don't have anyting against Obama, but I want the Executive Branch cut down to size. And if Obama doesn't do the right thing, and he is sitting in that branch when it gets cut down to size, then so be it.
| |
| | | | ||
Docudharma:: Quote for Discussion: Facing our Failure
And Uthman's writing is all the more reason for and was probably intended as motivation to pursue criminal charges against Bush, Cheney, et al, in my view. He says in the middle of the quote that "All of this could have and should have ...
Docudharma - Recommended Diaries - http://www.docudharma.com/
Stephanopoulos Pushes Obama to Drop Tax Cuts and to Prosecute ...
Stephanopoulos put this e-mailed question up on the screen from “Bob Fertik of New York City,” failing to note he's a left-wing activist with “Prosecute Bush & Cheney!” at the top of his Web site: “Will you appoint a special prosecutor ...
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal... - http://newsbusters.org/
False Assumptions About The Presumption Of Innocence
OpEdNews - Newtown,PA,USA
... they think that President George W. Bush and Vice-President Cheney are innocent because President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have not been impeached ...
See all stories on this topic
Bush’s legacy: Negative or too soon to tell?
LimaOhio.com - OH
It makes me most sick though that he was not impeached, reprimanded, or anything," user Devadv wrote. "WE ALL LET HIM DO IT. ...
Repeal the 22nd Amendment. No, really. - Saturn Smith - Open Salon
And assuming that people will impeach as needed is also naive—just look at how many truly awful things Bush 43 and Cheney have done and how unwilling to impeach people are. It's just not an adequate safeguard. (For one thing, it doesn't ...
Saturn Smith's Open Salon Blog - http://open.salon.com/user.
The Bush administration conundrum
OpEdNews - Newtown,PA,USA
2007, many, including myself, urged the House to impeach Bush and/or Cheney for war crimes, to wit: An illegal invasion of Iraq based entirely on lies and ...
See all stories on this topic
An Up To Date Copy Of A Plan To Prosecute_Officials!
INSTEAD of looking closely at what high-level officeholders in the Bush administration have done over the past eight years, and recognizing what we have tacitly permitted, we would rather turn our faces forward toward a better future, promising that 2009 and the inauguration of Barack Obama will mean ringing out Guantánamo Bay and ringing in due process; it will bring the end of waterboarding and the reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions.
Indeed, the almost universal response to the recent bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee — finding former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials directly responsible for detainee abuse that clearly rose to the level of torture — has been a collective agreement that no one need be punished so long as we solemnly vow that such atrocities never happen again.
This hope that the election represents some kind of legal self-cleansing, a constitutional “rebooting” of the rule of law, is of course not the language of the law. It is the language of recovery, of religion, of political pragmatism.
Those who say that there should be no investigation or prosecution of senior officials who authorized torture and warrant-less surveillance rarely even bother offering legal justifications. They argue that the Obama administration has more urgent problems to contend with. They insist that any such process would devolve into partisan backbiting from which this country could never recover. And they insist, as did Attorney General Michael Mukasey in early December, that there is no basis on which to prosecute the architects of torture and wiretapping policies because each was acting to “protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful.”
Others — including unnamed officials on the Obama transition team — have already claimed that there is simply NO POLITICAL WILL FOR CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS, OR EVEN A TRUTH COMMISSION.
Of course all this is not the language of the law either. It is the language of self-fulfilling prophecy. With each successive recitation that there is no political will, the political will dissipates.
With each repetition of the mantra that Americans just want to turn the page on the past eight years, Americans feel ever better about turning the page.
And why wouldn’t we? We aren’t merely forgiving Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney (who admitted in December to approving torture techniques) and others for their actions. We are also forgiving ourselves. We are telling ourselves that what happened at Abu Ghraib is behind us, and that what happened at C.I.A. black sites is over. We are telling ourselves that bad people did bad things under bad circumstances, but that it’s better to forgive and forget, that we are really truly sorry and it won’t happen again. We sound like a nation of drunks after a bender. We are full of good intentions, but unwilling to hold ourselves to account.
Nobody is looking for a series of public floggings. The blueprints for government accountability look nothing like witch hunts. They look like legal processes that have served us for centuries. And, as the Armed Services Committee report makes clear, we already know an enormous amount about what happened to take us down the road to torture and eavesdropping. The military has commissioned at least three investigative reports about the descent into abusive interrogation. Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has compiled what he believes to be sufficient evidence to try senior Bush administration officials for war crimes. More previously secret memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were released just last week.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that the first step will be a thorough determination of what has occurred. To that end, this week the House Judiciary Committee chairman, John Conyers Jr., introduced legislation for a panel to investigate the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration. Such a commission would not constitute a criminal investigation, but it would not preclude one either.
Some commentators have suggested that any such truth commission should promise immunity or a pardon in exchange for truthful testimony, but I believe that if it becomes clear that laws were broken, or that war crimes were committed, a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate further.
The Bush administration made its worst errors in judgment when it determined that the laws simply don’t apply to certain people. If we declare presumptively that there can be no justice for high-level government officials who acted illegally then we exhibit the same contempt for the rule of law.
It’s not a witch hunt simply because political actors are under investigation. The process of investigating and prosecuting crimes makes up the bricks and mortar of our prosecutorial system. We don’t immunize drug dealers, pickpockets or car thieves because holding them to account is uncomfortable, difficult or divisive. We don’t protest that “it’s all behind us now” when a bank robber is brought to trial.
And America tends to survive the ugliness of public reckonings, from Nixon to Whitewater to the impeachment hearings, because for all our cheerful optimism, Americans fundamentally understand that nobody should be above the law. As the chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson, warned: “Law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.”
He Is Unforgiving.
Throngs of well-wishers are expected to line the tracks as Obama travels by Amtrak from Philly to D.C. for his swearing-in, prompting heightened security along the rails, The Associated Press’ Brian Westley updates. Security experts tell CNN’sJeanne Meserve and Mike M. Ahlers the whistle-stop presents traditional threats to the VIPs on board but also to infrastructure along the way. With an estimated one million riders expected to mob the D.C. Metro on Jan. 20, security officials, similarly, are concerned not only about the comfort level, but also about protecting the system from terrorists, USA Today’s Tom Frank and Kevin Johnson relate — and see Media General’s Neil H. Simon for more on the general theme of “unprecedented” inaugural security, plus a related Washington Post leader decrying the relentlessly emerging “trappings of a closed and unwelcoming event.”
From each group that backed Obama, an agenda
San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA
For more information go to www.change.org/ideas. -- In December, members of the liberal online hubMoveOn.org voted on their top priorities for the new ...
See all stories on this topic
We All Live in Clint Eastwood's America
Huffington Post - New York,NY,USA
For a man of few words, with a persona known for shooting first and asking questions later, Clint Eastwood is a powerful vox populi. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment