[GJM] Fw: Notes From the Trail... The Self-Impeaching President

[marguerite hampton]

 Just as Marilyn Nyborg urged me on with a "you go girl" 
I'm saying "you go guy" to Steve Bhaerman".   

Many thanks for this one. 

eco 
 
-------Original Message-------
 
From: Steve Bhaerman
Date: 01/15/07 17:53:33
To: ecopilgrim at aabol.com
Subject: Notes From the Trail... The Self-Impeaching President
 
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Self-Impeaching President - Just Add Sunlight and Watch the Grassroots
Grow 
January 15, 2007 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
by Steve Bhaerman
George (“You’re either with me or against me”) Bush has drawn his line in
the Iraqi desert sand. He is only willing to continue as Chief Executive on
his terms. Unless he is allowed to rule by his own rules, he just doesn’t
want the job. He hasn’t exactly said so, but actions speak louder than words
 His recent tack of firing big shots until he finds military leaders who
agree with his approach -- and his making threatening gestures towards Iran
-- indicates that he intends to act as the one-and-only Commander-In-Chief
until he is relieved of his command.
And with a surprising number of Republican Senators just saying no as an
immediate response to his speech, perhaps there is a sense of panic that if
he is allowed to occupy the seat of power until the bitter end, the party of
Lincoln and Ford will go the way of the Edsel. Consider the remarks made by
his brother Jeb last month. When a Spanish language radio station asked
about his future after being termed out as governor of Florida, Jeb replied
tersely, “No tengo futuro -- I have no future.” 
While Jeb scurried to distance himself from his own remarks, the
implications of his bitter blurtings -- and the elder President Bush
breaking down in sobs at Jeb’s farewell dinner -- indicate that having the
name Bush will become a bigger political liability than having the middle
name “Hussein” any time in the near future. Think of it this way. Have you
ever heard of a political candidate named Fred Hitler? You haven’t? I rest
my case. 
Nancy Pelosi was absolutely right in declaring impeachment off the table.
Before impeachment comes investigation and -- despite those “dress-stain
patriots” eight or nine years ago -- impeachment cannot be a partisan
endeavor. But the tables are turning quickly, and hopefully will turn
quickly enough to avoid a military attack on Iran by either us or Israel.
Consider this ad in last Friday’s New York Times and realize that the 800
000 who signed the petition should be 5, 10 or 50 million people. 
The Upwising Continues ... 
I spoke with someone who has been analyzing the election results for the
Democratic Party, and this individual concluded that what pushed the
Democrats over the top were independent voters who understood that electing
a Democratic majority was the only way in our political system to give a
sitting president a “vote of no confidence.” From everything I have been
hearing, reading and sensing there are influential people at all levels of
government who are no longer willing to participate in a government run like
a criminal enterprise. The key factor in activating this “air support” at
the top is a groundswell of ground support at the grassroots. 
And so the next step in moving the upwising forward is taking on two
inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. The first is -- expressed tersely --
that we are not in Iraq to keep the peace, we are there to keep the pieces.
The Democrats have made a strategic, if not moral, blunder in failing to
contextualize our misadventure in Iraq as a necessary and predictable move
of a nation that has forsaken its founding as a republic to become an empire
 The real issue -- and this is one the mainstream media has avoided as much
as it has the questionable answers around 9/11 -- is that we have to choose
as a people whether or not we are willing to pay the economic and moral
price of empire. 
The American people up to this point have been able to have it both ways.
They’ve been able to take cover behind the various lies the Bush regime (and
their enablers in Congress on both sides of the aisle) have perpetrated
about why we invaded Iraq. They can now jump on the get-out-of-Iraq
bandwagon for the wrong reason -- we aren’t winning, and the Iraqi people
are incapable of governing themselves. The real truth -- vividly exposed in
Iraq but just as true during the Clinton years where corporate globalization
continued to devour local autonomy throughout the world -- is that our
economy as it exists today has become frighteningly dependent on death and
destruction. 
If you haven’t done so already, go rent the DVD Why We Fight and invite a
bunch of friends over to watch it with you. There you will see vividly the
elephant (and its jackass fellow travelers) in the living room. Our entire
house of cards economy is based on beating plowshares into swords, all for
the benefit of a few. It’s completely consistent and congruent that Vice
President Cheney invited only the leaders of the oil industry into his
conference to discuss energy policy nearly six years ago, and the ostensible
conversation was how to divvy up the oil fields of Iraq. For a more updated
take on how the oil industry has already achieved its objectives, please see
this article by Chris Floyd. 

Are We Losing Our Ass to Save Face? 
The President’s call for an anti-insurgent surgency in Iraq is not just a
way for the President to “save face.” He is trying to save his ass. Because
when we pull away the cover of “preemptive self-defense” and see the Iraq
war for what it is -- a long-planned invasion of a sovereign nation -- then
the war becomes a war crime. Add to that the deception to get us involved,
torture and lack of due process for “suspects,” use of 9/11 and the war as a
pretext to remove civil liberties, and the use of secrecy to cover up other
criminal acts, and all of a sudden we’re looking at a crime scene. 
The second inconvenient truth Americans must face is that the new
repressions brought on by “the war on terror” is really just the “logical”
escalation of a system of secrecy and repression that has been in place
since the end of World War II. When you watch “Why We Fight,” you hear
Dwight Eisenhower’s prophetic warning that the interlocking directorate of
military, industry and intelligence along with a new “whore-ior” class of
paid-for legislators would be an internal enemy as formidable as the Soviet
Union, China or any foreign foe. In order to keep this system in place, what
Stephen Bassett calls a “Secret Empire” was established. Although Bassett
claims quite convincingly that the initial purpose of all this secrecy was
to suppress what the military knew about extraterrestrial visitors, secrecy
has become an all-purpose tool for keeping the American body politic
barefoot and pregnant. Secrecy provides cover for those who need answer to
no one, and absolute secrecy like absolute power corrupts absolutely. 
Trust in Government Hits “Iraq Bottom” 
Meanwhile back in the States, there has been a growing and inexplicable
state of malaise, cynicism, low-level fear and high-level mistrust. While
some of this undoubtedly dates to the Kennedy assassination and the likely
cover-up of what really happened, underneath it all Americans know they are
being lied to. According to a Zogby poll last May, trust in government and
media has hit “Iraq bottom.” Only 11% trust the media, and just under 25%
trust the President -- and this was before the voter fraud story broke, and
before the President’s intransigence reached its current level of
dysfunctionality. In this current awakening and “upwising” we see people
finally beginning to connect their own inner malaise with the evidence that
we may actually have more to fear from our own government than from those
terrorists they’ve been getting us worked up about. 
In the either/or, black-and-white world the media likes to present (the more
divided we the people are, the more conquerable), we are not expected to be
able to think and chew gum at the same time. If we are suspicious of our own
leaders, we must be supporting the terrorists or certainly not taking the
threat seriously enough. If Americans learn nothing else during this Age of
Nefarious, we must understand that the “enemies” of real freedom on both
sides, from Islamofascists to Neocon con artists, are more alike than they
are different. Each has an “us or them” world view that justifies their
immoral and illegal actions. Each has a stake in demonizing the other side.
Each uses selfish-righteous religious dogma to mobilize their masses. Each
insists you’re either with them or against them, with no middle ground. Each
uses fear, force, and fabrication as their primary weapons. 
The greatest threat to either of these obsolete and dangerous thought
systems is for people who have been thrust into one camp or another to wake
up, wise up, and recognize that all humans have a common interest that
transcends fighting one another. That old doomsday clock is still ticking,
only this time in addition to the nuclear bomb, we face a population bomb
and the environmental bomb of global warming. Interestingly, what we’ve come
to call the “biological imperative” includes not just survival of the
individual but survival of the species as well. And we now stand at a
dangerous time where the former is at odds with the latter. 
From Bystanders to Witnesses 
So ... back to the issues at hand, the upwising and prospects for regime
change in America. We can expect that the President will use every weapon in
his arsenal to bring recalcitrant Republicans back into the fold. He may
very well be able to enact his escalation plan without any oversight
whatsoever. Nevertheless, this too will be an opportunity for greater
awakening and understanding on the part of the American people. In her
excellent book, U.S. vs. George Bush, Elizabeth de la Vega makes an unusual
comparison. She compares the American body politic’s response to Bush’s
criminal behavior to the Kitty Genovese case. 
As you may remember, Kitty Genovese was a woman murdered in Queens in 1964
while thirty-eight neighbors watched and no one reported the incident to the
police until it was too late. While the murder was widely seen as evidence
of human callousness in modern society, a more sophisticated psychological
assessment of the case reveals something quite different. According to
psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley, “When people are in a group,
responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume someone else will make
the call.” So Kitty Genovese went unaided not in spite of everyone seeing it
 but because everyone saw it. 
As de la Vega points out, we Americans were all “bystanders” watching the
crime take place, and now we must become witnesses. In order for the
self-impeaching President to be actually impeached, it will take grassroots
awareness and participation. But remember, the Bush presidency isn’t a cause
 it’s a symptom. In the process, we must clearly understand and articulate
to anyone we speak with that the entire impeachable system must be impeached
 The egregious crimes of the Bush presidency are merely an expansion and
escalation of what has been done in secret for sixty years. We can no longer
pretend it’s happening to someone else and we need not be involved. We are
involved. 
The next question is, can we be “evolved” as well? The next two to five
years will determine whether we participate in an American evolution, where
we grow up to become citizens worthy of this country’s founding documents,
or whether we devolve into neo-feudalism disguised as big brother
totalitarianism. Never in our history has the choice been so stark. So
here’s the good news. Once awakened, people don’t seem to go back to sleep,
and people are awakening daily. As we acknowledge “we’re not in Kansas
anymore Toto,” and face the awful truth of what this nation has become, we
find that facing this prospect together is as empowering as it is daunting.
May 2007 be the year these fundamental issues break through the “soundless
barrier” and may America’s upwising be a beacon to the world. 

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