June 30
Is it time to take Bush's impeachment seriously? It's hard when the Republican majority in Congress refuses to investigate Bush in any way. Nonetheless, a recent Zogby poll indicates a large minority of Americans, 42% to be exact, think Bush should be impeached if he lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. 50% say no. Half technically isn't a majority, and given the way the trend has moved, there could quite soon be a plurality in favor of impeachment. It's also interesting that these are national figures. If the Southeast is so heavily for Bush, that removing it would make those in favor of impeachment a majority. I'm not sure what that tell us, except that red America still backs Bush and blue America doesn't merely disagree, but is ready to remove him.

While we're thinking of the practical problem of removing the acting president -- the Republican leadership in Congress doesn't investigate Republicans -- let's think a moment of the practical benefits of removing him. Yes, there are a couple practical benefits, and it isn't just that 42% are still angry over stolen elections or have grown bitter over having been deceived into Iraq War II. It wouldn't just feel good to remove this fraud. To win the wars, and allow me to reiterate that Iraq and Afghanistan are two separate wars with the common trait being not the same enemy, but the same bungled management, we need two things: allies, and management that won't bungle. To gain the latter, the current mismanager must go. Trusting leadership that has screwed up about everything so far to develop or implement a better strategy is nonsense. If there was any doubt, look at Bush's speech a couple nights ago -- he's not changing anything. For the other need, allies, a new international poll found that not only is America disliked, one might even say strongly disliked, just about everywhere, but a big reason for that is Bush is so widely despised (scroll to "America's image problem"). To put it bluntly, Bush has so alienated the rest of the world that we're not getting more help until he's gone.

Is there a legal case for impeachment? Much is hanging on these Downing Street memos. I previously compared them to the revelation that Nixon had taped his conversations. The refusal of Congress to investigate, and to try to stop Democrats carrying on their own investigations, speaks volumes about what those memos might lead to. While the first leaked memo, the one that kicked off the fuss, made it appear Bush lied about seeking a diplomatic solution when war was already determined and an excuse being sought, subsequent leaks have revealed that the war really started before it was authorized by Congress. The political cover provided by the authority to enforce no fly zones was used to drastically step up bombing in order to either provoke Iraq to react and provide an excuse, or to batter Iraq's defenses before the land invasion. This goes beyond deceiving Congress into granting authority to make war, and into making war with no authority, a blatant breach of the war making power expressly belonging to Congress in the Constitution. The point of that was an attempt by the founding fathers to restrain the president from a power they thought threatening to our own liberty.

So the key here is getting Congress to investigate, even if not officially with an eye to impeachment. Are there US equivalents to the UK memos? Did the exponentially increased bombing before war was authorized hit targets that clearly had nothing to do with enforcing no-fly zones, or are there extant orders to that effect? Why were WMD inspections stopped so soon after they started? When they used bogus intelligence, did they know it was bogus? Were the real reasons for the war different than what the public and Congress were told? Did Bush use intelligence he knew was bad but supported his case? No, Congress doesn't want to investigate, but it might still be possible if enough pressure builds up that congressmen sense that supporting Bush and their own political survival might be mutually exclusive. They no doubt think about the nightmare of Watergate as they refuse to investigate, so we must make them think less about avoiding the nightmare, and more about what they must do to survive it. Are these memos powerful enough to bring this about? An illustration of their effect comes from the reporter who broke the story, Michael Smith of the Times of London. He says he was a strong backer of the war, but the memos changed his mind completely.

June 25
Rep. Cunningham, the subject of the last paragraph in yesterday's entry, looks even worse as the details come out, and kudos to a mainstream media outlet which has been following up on this story, namely, Cunningham's hometown newspaper The San Diego Union Tribune. There's a bunch of tawdry, or funny, details in an article today. According to his former neighbors, Duke put enough bars on his house to give it a prison look and make the house an eyesore, and when the contractor, MZM Inc., held an open house, the neighbors discovered the place needed to be gutted. One neighbor selling his house justified the asking price by saying, "It's a good neighborhood, an improved house, and, let me put it this way, it's better without him here." Duke's new neighbors were bothered by the presence of protestors in their neighborhood, perhaps not realizing why they were there, and it sounds like when they got back from asking the protestors to leave, they found TV reporters setting up and FBI business cards in their doors. And this expensive gated house Duke was able to buy was bought from a corporate executive under federal indictment for accounting fraud. If I may indulge an I-told-you-so moment, I did say before the election that this stuff would keep happening if the Republicans were allowed to keep their US House majority. You may not think your representative is bad, but the Republican majority keeps putting people like Cunningham and DeLay in charge, so you can't vote Republican without voting to keep these crooks in office.

On that subject, notice they still won't investigate the Downing Street memos. It's as if in July 1973, when Alexander Butterfield told Congress that Nixon was recording his conversations in the Oval Office, Congress chose to ignore it.

June 24
Did I not predict this a little over a week ago? The cacophony (the key part perhaps being "phony) of chickenhawks and neocons blaming war critics and the press for Bush's failures in Iraq is growing, with two examples I heard just yesterday. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, Rumsfeld said, "I have a feeling they're getting pushed" to explain Americans turning against the war. He had no such complaint when few media outlets carried any contrasting opinion when he and his boss pushed for this war in the first place.

Bill O'Reilly's outrage got played on Air America, which apparently isn't under arrest for treason just yet, though that's what O'Reilly was calling for. He was going on about Dick Durbin's Nazi remark, and then tossed in a brief diatribe against "the liberal radio network" saying they should be under arrest. See, it's not the decision makers' bad decisions, nor the decisions makers' rampant corruption that causes the problem, but rather the people who point out the stupidity and corruption who are to blame for it. If there were no messengers bearing bad news, there would be no bad news. The main point I wish to make is that this stuff is just starting, and as Bush's failures and deceptions become clearer, the people who helped sell the deceptions will get louder about how people who caught the liars are more responsible than the liars.

Speaking of the architect of the sales campaign, Karl Rove made some controversial remarks about Democrats wanting to give the 911 hijackers indictments and therapy instead of hitting back, even though the vote for war in Afghanistan had only one dissenting vote, and that over concerns the resolution was too broad. He knows this of course, which makes his remarks a lie. It's not just tawdry to use 911 for political gain, which Rove and his acting president have been doing since 912. It's not just a low blow to question the patriotism of those with whom you disagree. Rove is out and out lying, as he did to get us into Iraq, and in doing so, he blew apart the unity of 911 in a remarkably short time. That's what's the most angering about this. The country was the most united it's been since Pearl Harbor, and he and Bush and the neocons used that to start a stupid war on false premises, putting those who saw through the lies in the position of either keeping silent in the face of a dreadful mistake so as to stay unified, or pointing out the deception and being branded a traitor. One needs only look at the lingering bitterness over Vietnam to see how strong and long lasting the scapegoating can be when he government screws up a war, and these guys will do everything they can to blame the war's opponents, even though the opponents had no influence on the decision to go to war or the decisions to carry it out.

Speaking of misusing patriotism, a classic example of patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel is US Rep. Duke Cunningham. Follow the timeline: Duke sells his house to a government contractor he is close to without any brokers or real estate agents being involved, just a quick cash transaction; the contractor promptly puts it back on the market for the same price, eventually settling for $700,000 less than they paid; the congressman helps the contractor get government goodies; the congressman gets caught; the congressman pushes for a ban on flag burning. Yes, that last one isn't merely next in sequence, but comes from Duke's problems. At least he knocked Tom Delay out of the headlines for a moment.

June 21
I was thinking yesterday there hadn't been a Take the Red Pill Award for awhile, and today there are three, two right next to each other in the collection of short bits. To start with, an award goes to US Rep. John N. Hostettler, R-Ind., who fed into the Christian fundamentalist persecution complex by saying on the House floor yesterday, "the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives" and "continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats." Yes John, you have it. Despite the majority of Democrats being Christians, they want to destroy the religion they practice. Oh right, only fundamentalists are really Christians. So I guess the Democrats are out to destroy every church, close down all the Christian radio stations, and change the Twin Cities to "Minneapolis/Some Guy Named Paul". Seriously, though his words won't be in the official record because he withdrew them sooner than have his words taken down, maybe it's best his words be known because there is a body of opinion that supports him. Making him retract his words doesn't change that.

The next award goes to Muslim fundamentalists in Kuwait, who reacted to the swearing in of the first female cabinet member, a status which only recently became legal for women, by attempting to shout down the swearing in. I guess enormous amounts of rudeness is OK when you have God figured out. Actually, being polite is still required, even when the temerity of a woman to be female violates your misogynistic interpretation of your holy text.

The next award is for the next story in that article. In Romania, an Orthodox monk killed a nun (why do fundamentalists always stick it to the women?) by exorcising her to death. Actually, he probably meant to exorcise a demon. Yes, a demon, in the western world in the 21st century. The nun must have gone along with this at some point, and four other nuns were indicted for helping. The church, to give some credit, denounced the killing and let's hope it will ask what is being taught that could lead to a deadly exorcism.

June 20
I was sent this photo e-mail. Rather telling, isn't it? There's more than the locked gate. Notice the White House staffer with the clenched fists, and what looks like a uniformed Secret Service agent approaching. It's a flashback to Watergate, with the White House acting like it's under seige. Someone should tell them that's a petition Conyers is carrying, not a petard. Maybe they're scared because they know it's not himself Conyers might be hoisting. Or maybe they just wonder how to explain how a Congressman can't get into the White House to deliver the petition. Kind of symbolic of the cooperation the minority party gets from the acting president.

June 18
Sometimes you can tell people are related without even seeing that they look like each other, as Jeb Bush demonstrated by showing he has no more ability to learn from mistakes than does his elder brother. He has reopened the Schiavo case asking the state attorney to look into why the 911 record from when Michael Schiavo reported Terri's collapse shows he called at 5:40 AM, but Schiavo said a couple years later he found her at 4:30 and a few years ago he said 5:00. Schiavo has always said he called immediately when he found her. Think about what this big investigation hinges on: some guy finds his wife collapsed in the wee hours, and then years afterwards is expected to have taken note of the exact time he found her. So 15 years and a fundamentalist crusade later, now the discrepancy is investigated. At his press conference, Bush acted quite moderate (video), like he was just finding this detail that needed checking, just to be thorough, and he wasn't insinuating anything. Take note though that he did this at a press conference, as if it's routine to personally step into a case with no evidence and on TV no less. Jeb comes across as less excitable than his brother, but note his actions. Not only was he a main driver of sensationalizing this case, but remember he once sent state agents to seize Terri in direct defiance of a court order, and the agents backed down from a confrontation with local police. This was at the same time he was saying he couldn't violate a court order. At least his elder brother sneers and chortles when he's doing something unscrupulous so we can tell.

The other development in the Schiavo case was how blatantly Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was caught lying. Thursday on Good Morning America, he said he never said she wasn't in a persistent vegetative state. The Daily Show then dug up the tape of Frist during the debate on the Senate floor, he said that after watching the video made of selected moments of Terri that she was not in a vegetative state. Jon Stewart commented, "Not only do I believe Senator Bill Frist may be a terrible doctor, I think he doesn't realize C-SPAN has cameras." Frist you may remember, was the same one who didn't know tears and sweat don't spread AIDS. The best thing about having him in the Senate is he isn't seeing patients anymore.

See the archives for earlier entries.