Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush
by Lewis Lapham, Harper’s Magazine, 2/27/06
A country is not only what it does(it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. (Kurt Tucholsky
On
December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.)
introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it
to form ‘a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent
to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of
pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture,
retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding
grounds for possible impeachment.’ Although buttressed two days
previously by the news of the National Security Agency’s illegal
surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or
no attention in the press(nothing on television or in the major papers,
some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the
websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete
silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in
mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few
propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president
whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of
the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last
forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the
Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much
less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of
democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by
President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman
intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what
did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early
January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter
recess. [read more]