What does this guy have to do to get impeached?

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Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:38:44 -0800 (PST)

What does this guy have to do to get impeached?

 

 

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Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2006-02-08 16:02. Impeachment

 

 

What does this guy have to do to get impeached?

By Greg Sagan, Amarillo Globe-News

 

The impeachment trial of President Clinton in January 1999 on two

articles voted on the month before by the House of Representatives set

an important standard for America, what might be called the " lowball

threshold " for impeachment and a standard that ought to be repudiated

right after it serves a more useful purpose.

 

.. . . The two articles of impeachment voted by the House alleged that

(1) Clinton provided " perjurious, false and misleading testimony " to

the grand jury investigating the Paula Jones matter (he had denied

allegations of sexual relations with Jones and Lewinsky); and (2) that

he had obstructed justice in his machinations to conceal evidence of

his hanky-panky.

 

Say what you like about Clinton's behavior in office, his impeachment

trial by the Republican Congress was received by people like me as a

loud message; an assertion that Republicans would not tolerate

dishonesty, deception, manipulation or violation of any of our laws by

the president.

 

We are now deluged with evidence that President Bush has violated

federal law in authorizing the National Security Agency to tap the

telephone and Internet communications of Americans without a warrant,

that he has violated international law by launching an unprovoked

invasion of another country, that he has violated the Geneva

Conventions by abusing prisoners of this war, and that he

manipulated Congress by offering sanitized versions of National

Intelligence Estimates about Iraq's weapons programs - versions that

did not contain the disclaimers and rebuttals in the original

documents he received from the CIA.

 

The latest cannonade comes from a television station in Great Britain

claiming to hold written minutes of a Jan. 31, 2003 meeting between

President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which our president

outlined a plan for provoking Iraq by flying a U-2 reconnaissance

plane and its fighter escorts in the markings of the United Nations in

hopes the Iraqis would shoot at them in violation of U.N. resolutions.

 

Disguising one's own forces in the colors and markings of another

country to trigger a war is, I understand, a rather egregious

violation of international law. When individual soldiers are caught in

uniforms other than their own in wartime, they can, quite legally, be

summarily executed as spies.

 

So people like me are wondering: Which side of the Clinton line does

this president's behavior fall on?

 

In my view all Americans - right or left, red or blue - must take a

large step back and disavow the current political trend of

accumulating power no matter what. It does not serve America in the

long run to have any party resorting to the kinds of tactics this

pattern reveals - a pattern of impeaching one's opponent on grounds

we, ourselves, are not willing to enforce on ourselves; a pattern of

constant attack over every stance or statement with which we do not

agree; a pattern of spinning and parsing and qualifying the truth so

that we look good no matter how bad we're being; a pattern of breaking

laws and violating constitutional safeguards in the name of expediency.

 

This must be stopped before it stops us.

 

I call on Congress to act. Now. I call on Congress to reclaim at least

some of the power its members have ceded so meekly to this president,

to denounce his violations of federal and international law, to cease

funding his ambitions, and to call him to account for what he has done.

 

Impeaching our president is repugnant. But even worse is the alternative.

 

The only other choice available to us now is to assert that the way to

avoid

being impeached is to commit lots of crimes, and big ones, so that the

American people cower at the magnitude of what must be cleaned up.

.............

 

Greg Sagan, an Amarillo resident, can be contacted in care of the Amarillo

Globe-News, P.O. Box 2091, Amarillo TX 79166, or letters. His

column appears Tuesday.