IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now. Not after the election. Not after the situation deteriorates further. Impeach George W. Bush for failing to faithfully execute the laws. Impeach George W. Bush now for what he has done to Iraq. Impeach George W. Bush now so that we can have a chance of fixing this total disaster:

Evidence of Marie Colvin
Evidence of Anthony Shadid
Evidence of Steven D.
Evidence of Fareed Zakaria

Comments

[Lee A. Arnold]

Brad, I think you are doing a great job. Thank you very much for everything and all that I continue to learn here.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/world/middleeast/29iraqwomen.html?ex=1319774400&en=771b86f0b17aef5f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

October 29, 2006

Iraqis See the Little Things Fade Away in War's Gloom
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD — The things the women missed were almost too small to notice at first.

Simple numbers and dates began to elude their memories. They were hugging their children less. Past pleasures, eating and listening to music, began to feel flat. They were shouting at their husbands like army commanders.

Small as they seemed, these scraps of life were the effects of the war as discussed by four Iraqi women on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in a women's center in Baghdad.

Their stories began with a familiar theme: the shrinking lives of middle-class families in the capital. Social clubs have emptied out. Weddings have been sparsely attended. But as the circle has become smaller, and as they focus intensely on just staying alive, they said, even the basics are being stripped away.

"All the elements of society have been dismantled," said Fawsia Abdul al-Attiya, a sociologist and a professor at Baghdad University. "You are afraid because you are a woman, a man, a Sunni, a Shiite, a Kurd.

"All these things start to change society."

In a room in the Amal Women's Network that was strewn with remnants of a morning meeting — a half-eaten piece of cake, an orange peel, some crumpled tissues — the women talked about the changes forced on their lives by that fear.

One of the women, a senior employee in an Iraqi ministry that is now run by religious Shiites, recalled recently walking through the gate of her office building with several colleagues, two wearing form-fitting dresses with bare heads and a third in a hijab, when security guards pulled the third woman aside.

"They told her to tell her friends to be more cautious," she said, leaning out of her high-backed chair. She asked that her name not be used because it would be recognized. She has received two threats on her life.

Her own office was a measure of just how far relations between Iraqis have unraveled. She has worked with her colleagues for 21 years, but in the past year, strange new alliances and rivalries have emerged. In business trips abroad, lists of those permitted to go were compiled along sectarian lines. Shiites chose Shiites. Sunnis chose Sunnis.

Basma al-Khateeb, a 47-year-old mother of three, shook her head sadly at the familiar tale. "We never dreamed it would be like this," she said.

Ms. Khateeb, who runs a program for youths at the center, said she missed the very simple pleasures that gave life its texture.

"Walking. Riding a bicycle down the street. We gave up so many things we used to do," she said. "Now we call them accessories."

Private lives have been dented and squeezed into uncomfortable positions. Houda, a 40-year-old layout designer for a magazine in Baghdad who would not give her last name, said the violence had cast her and her husband in the roles of emergency room doctors, shouting orders and performing urgent tasks. Little time remains for intimacy. The last time she remembers feeling happy together was a year ago.

"Something has changed," she said. "There is a kind of dryness between us now."

One conversation that comes up daily is about leaving Iraq, but there are no answers.

It is a daily struggle not to shout at her two teenage girls, one that she usually loses. She has stopped hugging and kissing them, a strange byproduct of extreme stress, she said. Recently, her 15-year-old called to say she missed her, though they had not been apart.

"I feel surrounded by threats," she said. "When I go to work. When they go to school."

As the violence tears the fabric of society, breaking communities and long-established social networks, even peoples' thinking is muted. Plans for the future are too painful, too breakable, many Baghdad residents say, and so their thoughts stay fixed on the immediate....

[Cranky Observer]

The fundamental problem is that those who agree with Brad don't need to read this, and those who refuse to read it won't ever agree with Brad. The "nice guy", "good guy to have a beer with", and "not a guy who is browbeaten by pansy schoolteacher defeatocrats" memes are still in operation out in flyover country. Can we get the mushy 20% of so-called Republicans now wavering in the middle? I fear not; once in the voting booth all memory of Iraq seems to flee from their minds and they punch the R button regardless.

Cranky

[David]

Brad--I think what you actually want is a coup. You can't do an impeachment, trial, and conviction in just over a week, even if you had a Congress that would do it. And whatever happens next Tuesday, we'll see a Congress [and a country] closely and rancorously divided as it's never been before. The most we can hope for is a coalition of the grownup--but given the increasingly juvenile behavior of just about everybody involved in politics and political commentary, that's looking more and more like a fantasy.

[andres]

Brad: Even if both Bush and Cheney were impeached, and even if there were sufficient votes in the House and Senate to impeach and remove them from office, and even if the words "President Hastert" didn't sound utterly appalling, a lot of "even ifs" in short, I still don't think impeaching Bush and Cheney is the best way to proceed.

Impeachment and removal will not do anything to punish the architects of the Iraq invasion, and whichever President succeeds them will in all likelihood pursue some policy of national conciliation by following Gerald Ford's example: presidential pardon followed by whitewashing of their historical records.

I don't want that. I want Bush, Cheney, and co. _prosecuted_ under:

(I) International law for Crimes against Peace (Nuremberg Principles section VI), namely launching an unprovoked war of aggression.

(II) International law for having violated the Geneva Conventions.

(III) US law for having repeatedly violated the right to habeas corpus and the right to legal counsel (Padilla, Arar, etc).

I would be all for impeaching and removing Bush and Cheney if that would lead to the immediate removal of US troops from Iraq, but that's not going to happen even if they are impeached and removed. In the meantime, there is a much better hope of holding Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates accountable in the future if they are allowed to finish their term peacefully and then, when they least expect it, the book is thrown against them Pinochet-style either by a foreign prosecutor such as Baltazar Garzon or by a US attorney who indicts them once they don't have the imperium of the Presidency protecting them. Think about it.

[christofay]

I agree with Andres that the only suitable place for Cheney administration officials is jail; I don't think we have time to wait for two plus more years.

We should be thinking caretaker president Pelosi.

Hastert, send him to juve, he'll like it.

[Mandos]

"Impeach George W. Bush now so that we can have a chance of fixing this total disaster:"

Fixing? I'm deeply skeptical of the concept of "Fixing" here. I'm skeptical of it because I'm also skeptical of military power as such making things better, and at present the only instrument and involvement the US has in that region is, ultimately, military power.

[jimBOB]

Times like these I wonder a bit about Brad's sanity. The chances of impeachment happening with the current makeup of the House? 0%.

Chances that even with a non-criminal majority in the House, impeachment could happen in the next 10 days? 0%.

Chances that even if we assume impeachment articles drafted and voted on before Nov. 7, conviction is possible? 0%.

And after all these impossibilities, suppose you succeeded with impeachment and conviction, what would you get? President Hastert.

I've had an "Impeach Bush" bumper sticker on my car for months, and I fully agree the man deserves it (as does Cheney). But I have no illusions that it'll happen absent a convincing Dem victory in the midterms, and even then conviction seems improbable. The reason I have the bumper sticker is not because I think impeachment is a live possibility, but because I want to bear witness that it's something that OUGHT to happen.

OTOH if the Dems take the House, I think the odds that there will be an impeachement trial of George W Bush are about 80%. Even if the Dems don't really want to take this step, the administration will force them to it through aggressive stonewalling.

[john c. halasz]

Since we're wondering off into la-la-land, I'll offer my fantasy scenario. Dems win a large majority in the House and 51 seats in the Senate. Investigations ensue leading to an impeachment resolution. The Senate votes narrowly to impeach and Pelosi is sworn in as president. She picks a V.P., say Al Gore, and resigns promptly upon his confirmation. Gore then nominates a V.P., say Chuck Hagel, and appoints a bi-partisan cabinet in a care-taking government of national unity: James Baker at State, Gen. Zinni at Defense, Paul Volcker at Treasury, Jimmy Carter at the U.N., etc. And then moves toward a realistic rational policy of phased withdrawal from Iraq, shoring up Afghanistan, dealing with the fiscal mess, etc. begin- in short, working to restore domestic and international credibility. None of that is exactly my cup of tea, but then nothing of the past 6 years has been remotely to my liking either. But the fact of the matter is that Bush and Cheney are simply too dangerous to be left in office for the remaining 2 years.

[christofay]

With my GPS unit we are already in la la land, what's yours indicate?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/us/30arlingtonblurb.html

October 30, 2006

A Most Violent Month, and Many Final Farewells
Photographs by DOUG MILLS

Burials at Arlington National Cemetery took on a grim regularity in October, when at least 103 American troops were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the toll had reached 99 by Saturday, making October the deadliest month since January 2005.

Military officials attributed the high number of deaths to a spike in violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began in late September and ended last week. They also pointed to a three-month campaign to win control of Baghdad from death squads that led to increased attacks on American troops.

But such explanations were little comfort to a 6-year-old girl weeping at the grave of her father, a mother clutching the flag from her son’s coffin, or a widow walking slowly through the rain behind her husband’s honor guard.

[anne]

All that matters is leaving Iraq immediately.

[Jodin Morey]

Do-It-Yourself Impeachment, no joke.
The Citizens' movement!

The day the nation demands impeachment is almost upon us. On Jan 3rd, sacks and sacks of mail will be sent to congress demanding impeachment via the House of Representative's own rules. This legal document is as binding as if a State or if the House itself passed the impeachment resolution (H.R. 635).

There's a little known and rarely used clause of the "Jefferson Manual" in the rules for the House of Representatives which sets forth the various ways in which a president can be impeached. Only the House Judiciary Committee puts together the Articles of Impeachment, but before that happens, someone has to initiate the process.

That's where we come in. In addition to the State-by-State method, one of the ways to get impeachment going is for individual citizens like you and me to submit a memorial. ImpeachforPeace.org has created a new memorial based on one which was successful in impeaching a federal official in the past. You can find it on their website as a PDF.

STOP WAITING FOR YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO ACT FOR YOU.

You can initiate the impeachment process yourself by downloading the memorial, filling in the relevant information in the blanks (your name, state, etc.), and sending it in. Be a part of history.

http://ImpeachForPeace.org/ImpeachNow.html

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

Impeachment would do one thing good. It would prevent the end of term pardons.