By Stanley Rogouski, 5/19/06
With Bush’s poll numbers at all an time low, the strategy of
the Democrats is becoming more and more clear, the illusion of inevitability.
Rahm Emmanuel, Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton are running not against the
Republicans, but against their own liberal, activist base. Every day the
numbers are repeated, 35%, 33%, 30%. They came down from Harris or Gallup and
are immediately posted up on the big Democratic Party websites. Read The Daily
Kos, Atrios, or Firedoglake, and the underlying message is clear. Look at the
polls. The only thing that can keep the Republicans in power now is too much
talk about gay marriage, abortion, and the war in Iraq. Just let us win in 2006
and 2008 and, after we’re in power, we’ll do whatever you want.
As a result, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is
carefully distancing itself from the idea of impeaching Bush.
Howard Dean, on
MSNBC, has declared that impeachment is unlikely.
You know, unless there’s a terrible smoking gun, I think
impeachment is going to come pretty low on the list, because we have got to
really turn this country around and that is a big job.
Nancy
Pelosi has flat out said it’s off the table.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) told her caucus
members during their weekly closed meeting Wednesday “that impeachment is
off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it,” spokesman Brendan
Daly said.
Elizabeth Edwards has
remarked that impeachment would make Washington ‘unpleasant’:
“I’d like for him not to be president, and obviously,
I worked very hard for that to not be the case. But I thought impeachment was
very bad for this country,” she said, referring to the 1998 impeachment of
President Clinton. “Washington was a very unpleasant place to be, and
still is an unpleasant place to be, and impeachment made it worse.”
And
even John Conyers of the Congressional black caucus has come out and argued
against it.
Indeed, Conyers, the subject of an all out attack by
Democratic journalist Joe Klein (who all but compares Conyers to Louis
Farrakhan and Huey Newton) seems to have been beaten into submission, unwilling
to go down in history as the man who cost his party their landslide in 2006 and
2008.
‘So, rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to
propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses. The oversight I have
suggested would be performed by a select committee made up equally of Democrats
and Republicans and chosen by the House speaker and the minority leader.’
History says this is a bad strategy. By declaring
impeachment to be off the table, Conyers, Pelosi and Dean are poised to make
the same fatal errors in 2006 and 2008 that Clinton, Lee Hamilton, and Tom
Foley did in 1992. If the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the 1990s was a farce,
the attacks on any Democratic president who slips into office in 2008 without
taking on the Bush regime directly will go down as a tragedy the likes of which
this country has never seen.
In 1992, the Democrats were riding high. They had not only
captured the White House with the mediagenic Bill Clinton (the charisma
impaired Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale seemed as far off as ancient Rome),
they controlled both houses of Congress. The Cold War had ended. The Berlin
Wall had fallen, and the Republicans had been deprived of their most effective
campaign strategy, fear of communism. People were sick of war, recession, and
self-righteous right-wing assholes in general. Kurt Cobain was cooler than
Gordon Gecko. The President was young, intellectual, and open-minded. Legal
abortion seemed safe. The pendulum seemed to have indeed swung back to the left
after 12 years of Bush and Reagan.
The Clinton presidency fell apart faster than anybody could
have imagined. Clinton backed down on gays in the military and health care
reform. The Democrats kept up the murderous blockade of Iraq that (by their own
admission) killed 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1994 the Republicans came roaring
back on an explicitly right wing campaign led by Newt Gingrich and recaptured
Congress. After that Clinton could do nothing but hang on to power in the face
of the greatest right-wing onslaught directed at any American president in
history. His biggest accomplishments, balancing the budget, ending welfare, and
declaring that the end of big government had arrived, would have made any
conservative proud. But even taking all of this into account, the center seemed
to have held in 2000. Bush was able to steal the election but the Democrats got
control of the Senate back when Jim Jeffords of Vermont declared himself to be
an independent. Bush spent most of his first 8 months in office as a laughing
stock.
But no one could have anticipated the terrorist attacks in
2001. It not only rallied the country around the president, it gave the
Republicans back the issue that they had so sorely lacked since 1989, fear.
Indeed, with fear of Islamic terrorism replacing the fear of communism and with
the ‘war on terror’ the new cold war, the Republicans were able to take back
congress in 2002 and pass a whole round of legislation consolidating power in
the executive. And this is where the fatal mistake of 1992 came back to haunt
not only the Democrats, but also the American people as a whole.
I’m talking about the failure to pursue Iran Contra, to look
the other way in the face of a gigantic festering sore because it was too risky
politically.
Where did it lead?
Otto Reich, Michael Ledeen, John Negroponte, John
Poindexter, most people can probably tell you that they were major figures in
the Iran contra scandal, and most people can also tell you that they all went
on to positions in the second Bush administration. Indeed, John Negroponte is
now the head of a consolidated intelligence service and is now in effective
control of both the CIA and FBI. Most of us also know that the war in Iraq was
at least in part motivated by a cabal of neoconservatives at least partly
guided by people connected to the Iran contra scandal. Ledeen is a major
influence on Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. Elliot Abrams, an Iran contra
defendant, is one of the original signatories of PNAC.
By shutting down the Iran Contra investigations in 1992 in
the face of threats by Republican leaders to scuttle their domestic agenda,
Foley, Clinton and Hamilton not only allowed the old Iran contra crowd to pop
up in the second Bush administration, they left the issue of the balance of
power between the White House and Congress unresolved and set the table for
Bush’s power grabs, the Patriot Act, the NSA spying scandal, and the idea of
the ‘unitary executive’. None of this is new. Where Reagan simply lied about
his attempts to circumvent congressional oversight, Bush has been open about it.
Reagan backed down in the face of overwhelming evidence that he violated the
checks and balances inherent in the constitution. Bush has responded by
declaring them null and void. Where in 1992, we had a Democratic government an
unresolved set of conflicts between congress and the executive, and an
opportunity to right the runaway power of the chief executive, in 2006, we have
an out of control authoritarian in the White House, the beginnings of a
totalitarian state, and a Democratic Party unwilling to act as an opposition.
The stakes are much higher this time around. If the Democrats fail to impeach
President Bush and fail to see that Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz,
and Richard Perle do hard time in jail, they have essentially declared that the
invasion of Iraq and the attacks on the civil liberties of American citizens is
part of a new normality. What they will not fight, we will learn or be forced
to accept. Any Democrat elected under these circumstances in 2008 will not be
able to govern as a progressive, or even as a centrist. He or she will spend
the entire term in office hostage to right-wing attacks, serving as a caretaker
for the return of the same neocons who got us into war in 2002.
So with the Democrats having declared openly that they will
not seek anything beyond a return to office for themselves, that they will not
work to dislodge the neocon war criminals that got us into Iraq, defund the Christian
fascist faith based infrastructure that has worked its way into every level of
the government bureaucracy, repeal the patriot act or dismantle the
authoritarian system of government that the Bush Regime has set up, I have a
suggestion.
Let’s drive him out of office ourselves. Instead of
depending on Democratic politicians to start impeachment hearings, let’s take
to the street in mass, nonviolent protest and shut the whole country down until
the entire Bush regime is driven out of office along with their whole program.
Let’s demand that the Patriot Act be repealed not reformed. Let’s demand that they
shut down the concentration camp at Gitmo. Let’s demand that Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Condelezza Rice, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, and Paul Wolfowitz be
led away to The Hague in leg irons. As long as any of these people are free, as
long as Christian fundamentalists have access to our tax money, as long as the
beginnings of the fascist state Bush as worked so hard to construct over the
past 5 years is allowed to stand, nobody in the world is safe, no American can
be free, and no Democratic president or congress will mean anything more than
changing the furniture in the White House.