With Friends Like These ---------
Most any newspaper or blog includes today's story of Pakistan's warning to the US that any attempt to use military force against Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban in Pakistan is "unacceptable".
Musharraf is supposed to be our ally. What's that about?
What that's about is that Bush is now seen as such a joke in the international community that few take him seriously, have any respect for him, and consequently believe that they can ignore, and, in the case of Pakistan today, defy the will of the American people, thought of as represented by Bush.
The international community knows that he(and we, by extension) can huff and puff but can no longer blow any one's house down. Our military strength has been compromised, if not neutered; our reputation as a stalwart leader of freedom has become a joke due to our actions against a sovereign country, Iraq, which posed no threat to us, but which sits on the planet's second or third largest deposits of oil; our political and moral divisiveness is common knowledge around the globe; our elected politicians' bought and paid for blind allegiance to Israel enrages virtually all peoples in the Middle East and likely other peoples who resent those who want to rule by fiat (executive privilege in today's spin) and anyone who believes that their shit don't stink.
I've talked to many of my friends about Impeachment. Most of them still think it's a waste of time and focus, a diversion from attention to the fiasco of Iraq. I used to think that way too.
I have changed my mind and now believe and support those Constitutional scholars and lawyers who are saying that Impeachment is not a Constitutional Crisis but a cure for a Constitutional crisis.
The Founders of our country anticipated this, having revolted against those who wanted to rule, not govern. It's likely that earlier generations in our country were concerned about this, but I suspect that what is going on today is perhaps the closest we as a people and country have come to being faced with a challenge from those who have such a desire for control and rule that they have no qualms about riding roughshod over our Constitution and all its values and safeguards, plus the views, wishes and hopes of those who voted them into office.
Yes, Iraq is a sickness, an illness of great distress, but perhaps is a symptom of a plague which has the potential to wipe out all the progress of society's efforts of the last two centuries to provide a social and cultural system which recognizes, appreciates and values the synergistic expression of enormous numbers of individuals, as recorded by their private votes, whether well considered or not; but certainly at least self-interested, and as such were made as a personal expression of hope that the future will be better than the past.
Cheney/Bush should be brought to justice through the process of Impeachment, the legal terms and articles of which can be drawn by Constitutional lawyers and scholars, but which, in effect, represent what most citizens believe is criminal intent and inimical to the health of America and it's people.
Leanderthal
Lighthouse Keeper
1 comment:
Bush and Cheney should be impeached, but I believe because of the violence they have done to our constitutional system of checks and balances rather than over Iraq. (Congress authorized the Iraq war, as Hillary and her supporters would like to forget, and has not exactly stood tall on the war since then.)
On a couple of specific points I must take issue. Do you really expect Musharraf to say that it's OK for American troops to enter his country? That would be political, and maybe literal suicide. If we go in--and we may already be there--it should be covertly, with our presence denied by us and by the Pakistanis. Yes, I know, covert operations have a bad rep, but sometimes they are needed and this may be one of those tims. The ability of this administration to mount a covert operation is, of course, dubious, but we are stuck with those bozos and must make the best of it.
Your obsession--I cannot call it anything else--with Israel also leads you to distort matters. To begin with, American support for Israel is not "bought and paid for." The Clinton administration was notably less aligned with Israeli policy than the present one. Is that because campaign contributions from Zionists is higher to Repubs than Democrats? No, it is because Bush & Co. have a simplistic view of the world. This is not the place to discuss the vagaries of American policy toward Israel, but suffice to say that it has been highly complex.
And you seem to miss that the situation between Israel and its neighbors is also complex. Are you aware that a delegation from the Arab League is in Israel this week? One of its members is the Egyptian foreign minister (recall that Israel and Egypt have been at peace for almost 30 years now). An interesting point: when the Egyptian government said the foreign minister was representing Egypt, the Arab League stepped up to say that, no, he was representing the League. That has tremendous symbolic significance: the Arab League wants to be seen as negotiating with Israel. For those of us who grew up in the 1950's '60's and '70's, who remember the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, that is an almost inconceivable change.
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