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I'm not sure whether I was responding to your post, but I think you are asking legitimate questions in any event. Sorry my post is so long.
We agree that Bush's criminal behavior is the cause of these problems.
As for Bush attacking Iran, if he chooses to, he will, whether we impeach or not. If he attacks Iran, based on Bush's past conduct, it will be because he has a longstanding plan and finds a pretext to do so. There is nothing to be done about that.
Will impeachment improve the economy, the housing crisis, the healthcare crisis, the war? In my OP I explain that I believe it will. Thus far we have been unable to agree on how to solve these problems because we are such a divided people. The divisions, to some extent about money, culture and morality are, even more, about how we perceive, understand and talk about facts.
The greatest bar to our agreeing at least to a reasonable extent about the facts is the secrecy and lies of our current government. The process of impeachment will allow us to get the facts on the table.
In my own version of the facts since Johnson, D.C. lobbyists have become more and more powerful. Since Bush has been in office, they have virtually taken over the government.
For example, no-competition defense contracts have become increasingly the norm since the Johnson era. But no president has dared to shower his friends and maybe even himself with the profits from these kinds of deals like Bush has. As a result, the parasite of corruption has nearly strangled our government. That corruption is a major cause of our financial problems.
Until it is proved through the impeachment of Bush and Cheney that leaders who steal from the American people will be investigated and that the facts about their acts will be held up for all to see, we will never stop these serious crimes against the American people. We will never enjoy honest government.
We cannot alleviate, much less solve our financial, environmental and healthcare problems or stop illegal wars unless we have honest government -- even if we finally decide that the solutions to some of our problems do not necessarily involve government. Most important, we cannot have physical security unless we have honest government.
Will the impeachment process take a lot of time? Could that time be used to pass positive legislation? The answers are "yes" to both questions. But will such "positive legislation" ever really become law, will positive answers to our problems ever receive the people's support without impeachment? I doubt it. That is why impeachment must be the priority.
We, the people, need to finally say, enough already of this corruption and secrecy. We want to know the facts. We demand open, honest government. Mr. president, we will require you to come before us, to testify and to clarify the facts.
While technically the Senate sits as the jury and judge in an impeachment proceeding, the presentation of the evidence during the process of impeachment will allow every interested American to decide for him or herself just what the facts are. Will we ever agree 100%? No, but at the moment we cannot even talk the same language, much less agree on legislation. And why? Because our ideas about what the facts are, are just too divergent. Limbaugh has one version; Randi Rhodes has another and the rest of America is lost somewhere in between. And what none of us admit is that not a one of us has enough information to determine the whole truth.
Why would impeachment be a better process than ordinary committee hearings? First, impeachment allows the House to question the president and his aides without the assertion of the executive privilege (assuming it exists). Second, the drama of a quasi-trial is more interesting to follow. The time constraints on questioning in committee hearings will not impede examiners from completing a line of questioning. Witnesses will be less able to confuse examiners and evade questions. The purpose of the examination will be to reach the truth, not to impress C-Span viewers with the questioner's own grasp of the facts.
In Federalist Paper No. 65, Alexander Hamilton acknowledges that impeachment is a political process and that it is likely to be partisan, but he also explains that impeachment must be carried out by the House because that is the branch of government closest and most responsive to the people.
Thus impeachment is the process through which the people directly intervene to stop crimes against themselves. It is the process through which the people reassert their supremacy in a government that has become not a government by and for the people, but a government by and for the lobbyists and the politicians in their pay. It is precisely that aspect of impeachment that is necessary if we are to come together as a people to solve our problems.
Note on another topic:
I urge you again to read Federalist Paper No. 65. It is available on the internet.
My reading of Federalist Paper No. 65 convinces me that unless Bush is impeached he cannot later be prosecuted in a court of law for crimes committed in his official role.
The rulings that provide that Clinton could be prosecuted for his alleged crimes once he left office do not apply. Clinton's alleged perjury was about a personal matter as were the other wrongs of which he was accused. In contrast, Bush's lies were about public matters. He must be impeached first in my opinion.
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