Why We Must Impeach

Posted by: Skeptic

Skeptic

After Spending a C-SPAN afternoon watching the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on executive power and its constitutional limitations (i.e., the Bush-Cheney impeachment hearings), I was dismayed by the superficial coverage given by local news. I searched in vain for a report of any substance and found instead brief and cynical descriptions of the procedure, never departing from the accepted mainstream media script: noisy anti-Bush demonstrators, a few meaningless exchanges, no actual content of interest...

Newspaper readers wouldn’t know that there were hours of powerful testimony, thoughtful questioning of witnesses and serious statements from members of Congress.

C-SPAN revealed that; (1) either a dozen senior Congress members and several well-known expert witnesses went certifiably and collectively insane for 6 hours or else (2) charges of the most extreme abuses of power ever exposed in the history of the United States were backed up by overwhelming evidence during a six-hour hearing of the House Judiciary Committee which focused itself on the distinct possibility that both the President and the Vice President of the United Sates of America should be impeached.

Either way, any nation with a public communications system worthy of a modern democratic republic would have announced the astounding news to all its citizens. Newsstands would have been mobbed. But what we have in this country is a corporate media conglomerate in which newscasters function as a propaganda organ of the Executive Branch of the federal government.

So we saw and heard nothing.

The Associate Deputy Undersecretaries of Media, Campbell Brown and Erica Hill, actually reported that there is "not enough time" for impeaching Bush and Cheney and that if the Democrats insisted on impeachment the voters would punish them and the impeachment hearing was a waste of time and money that could have been better spent publicizing the president’s many accomplishments; the end.

I’m not making any of this up.

So what exactly did we miss? Well, we missed a general congressional consensus that the president regularly violates numerous federal laws, and that he even announces his intention to do so with "signing statements."

This is of course absolutely unprecedented and is without any question a major violation of the U.S. Constitution.

We missed hearing that the current president has ignored numerous legitimate requests, subpoenas and contempt citations, effectively overriding the US Congress as having the authority, the duty and the legitimate power to control the Executive and Judiciary Branches, or even to know what those branches are doing with the people’s money.

Again, this behavior is completely unprecedented and constitutes a major violation of the basic system of checks and balances established by the US Constitution. When Richard Nixon tried to do something similar (although not nearly as serious) the Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Mr. Nixon.

We missed that the current president has openly confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that because of this crime alone, the impeachment of Messrs. Bush and Cheney could be accomplished in under one week because all the necessary information is already in the public domain.

THAT is what we missed because the news media failed in its duty to the citizens.

Don’t we have a right to know what happened? Who silenced the media? How was it done? How will our children ever know what happened? And if we but look at the White House website (http://www.whitehouse.gov/) and think that we see numerous signing statements declaring the Chief Executive’s intention to violate federal laws and defy Congressional subpoenas, are we delusional? Are we going insane? Are we quietly seething with repressed anger and hatred for bibles, guns and flags? Is this why they say we hate our country?