The reality-based community takes a dive
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Bush and Cheney have broken the law consistently throughout their reign, often openly, and to the great detriment of our own country and others; when they obey it, they do so more as a matter of convenience than from any fealty to it or any fear of retribution. They’re pleased to use the legislature to achieve their ends when they can — as when Congress obligingly immunized administration personnel from prosecution under the War Crimes Act — and to ignore it when they can’t. Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith explains the dynamic as described to him by Dick Cheney’s current number two, torture maven David Addington: “We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” They have, and that larger force has not materialized — and the administration have been at pains to ensure that the force, if it ever arrives, won’t do so in the person of the courts — and
the result is a constitutional republic with its framework intact and its guts eviscerated. There is only one remedy, and that’s impeachment.The arguments advanced against impeachment by Congressional Democrats and their supporters, who number far too many among professed liberal commentators and bloggers, are weak at best: impeachment would take too long and distract from other legislative business, and conviction is all but impossible. But impeachment proceedings would take only a few months —
some of the crimes are so blatant that almost no investigation is necessary — the Congressional business from which impeachment would distract consists of little more than either enabling or ineffectually opposing the administration, and
the only guarantee of a failure to convict is the failure to impeach: things sometimes look different at the end of the process than at the beginning. Ask Dick Nixon............................
On the domestic front, impeachment proceedings would serve up a codified accounting of the administration’s behavior, something that the short attention span of the press, with its momentary focus upon and abandonment of scandals as they surface and then fade, discourages. Although the process needn’t last more than perhaps three or four months, that would be three or four months during which the specific crimes and the administration’s record in general would dominate the news.
The process would educate voters and provide Democrats with a rallying point that their leadership seems incapable of providing otherwise. ..........................
And
even if Democrats weren’t colluding, sometimes passively and sometimes actively, with the administration; even if they had been and were doing their level best to hold government officials accountable, they would still have a positive duty to impeach. They swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Anyone who takes that oath remotely to heart has no other option than to impeach, and the “reality-based community” has been woefully silent on that score — not uniformly, of course, but enough so to warrant a rant.
The constitution is meaningless unless our rulers pay a price for raping it. Until they do, we are no longer a democracy.more at:
http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1757