US midterm elections: impeachment, fear, a return to sanity ... there's a lot at stake

1. Fear is Driving this Political Drama -- by Hubert G. Locke/ Seattle Post-Intelligencer

At least one half of the nation is fervently hoping that, a week from next Tuesday, we will see the beginning of the end of the national nightmare in which we've been ensnared for the past six years and the start of a return to political sanity in America.

In the metropolitan Seattle area, there is likely an even larger segment of the populace -- angered by the antics of the party in power and anxious to be rid of a group that has turned out to be such a national embarrassment -- that eagerly anticipates the election outcomes in the hope that we can reclaim a sense of pride in our nation and a renewed confidence in those we choose to lead it.

The other half of the country undoubtedly fears that the election will also mark the beginning of the end -- the end of a determined and largely successful effort to halt the liberal advance that has marked the nation's politics for much of the past half century.

This portion of America -- after capturing statehouses and congressional delegations throughout the South and the nation's heartland, after enacting reams of legislation designed to preserve and protect values that it believes are the bedrock of American society, and after securing an ideological majority on the High Court to ensure that its political victories prevail -- is afraid it will all come undone, if it does not hold onto the reins of power.

Our nation probably has not been so polarized since the Civil War. And it cannot escape notice that, although we are a much larger and far more diverse country than we were a century and a half ago, the political battle lines today geographically are drawn essentially where they were then. There remains, even after 150 years, a largely North-South, urban-rural divide in America, with the West Coast more politically in tune with the North, the Western hinterlands more Southern in values and perspectives, and the suburbs and exurbs conflicted as to which side of the divide to join.

Ironically, the issues that divide the nation have not changed fundamentally in 150 years. Then it was slavery -- but slavery posed for Americans in the 19th century some of the same moral questions and contradictions that the immigration debate and the clamor about gay rights present today. (Perhaps not surprisingly, a generation after the Civil War ended, the nation found itself in turmoil over what to do about the floodtide of immigrants coming to these shores.)

Then, as now, it was about war, but unlike the present, war was seen on the eve of the clash between the states, in both the North and the South, as a tragic measure of last resort, not as a handy tool of national will. (As a historical side note, Abraham Lincoln vigorously denounced President Polk for unnecessarily, in Lincoln's view, launching the war with Mexico in 1846. Lincoln declared Polk's argument -- "that if it shall become necessary to repel invasion, the President may, without violation of the Constitution ... invade the territory of another country" -- permitted the chief executive "to make war at pleasure" and subject the American people to "the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions.")

Ironically also, both sides of the divide in this political drama are driven largely by fear. One side fears what America will revert to, if it is no longer in charge of defining and determining what is right and acceptable in American society. The other side fears what this nation has become in the past half-dozen years and will become even more so, if those who presently hold power are not stopped in their tracks.

Those in power have artfully used the fear of that half of the nation that believes it knows what is right and best for all of us, and combined it with the pervasive anxiety across the country about the possibility of another terrorist attack, to appeal to the most base instincts of the American people.

We've become a nation fearful of new minorities in our midst, willing to tolerate, in the name of patriotism, the enactment of gross violations of our cherished freedoms, indifferent to the worst kinds of abuse done in the name of our security, and disdainful of the opinion of other nations and peoples about our conduct.

We're capable of far better. In about 10 days, we'll see how it all turns out.

(Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.)


2. The Midterm Meltdown
Rogue President
By MICHAEL CARMICHAEL/Counterpunch

The president seems confused. After making a curious remark observing that the war in Iraq was placing a strain on the psyche of America, President Bush has become the primary focus of concerns about a strained psyche.

Last week, the president uttered more than one oracular pronouncement. First he acquiesced to the analogy that has been on everyone's lips since well before the launch of the Iraq War--Does Iraq resemble Vietnam? In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, President Bush agreed that the Ramadan offensive in Iraq smacks of the Tet offensive of 1968.

Later in another interview--President Bush stunned America with his pronouncement that he had never said that the US would, "Stay the course," in Iraq. After recovering several verbatim transcripts of the president's use of the exact phraseology that he now believes he never uttered, American pundits are puzzled by this expanding enigma enveloping the president's personal discourse. What will he say next?

That question was answered today, when President Bush addressed a small group at the White House with fifteen minutes of remarks during which he admitted he was now, "dissatisfied," with American progress in Iraq. Apparently, the President is dissatisfied that no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were discovered in Iraq. The loss of nearly 3,000 American lives and the disturbing growth in the insurgency now appear to be factors adding to the president's dissatisfaction.

From that point in his White House talk, the President veered off into a rambling statement that quite simply defies definition. President Bush said that he would stay in Iraq until the, "job is done," and, "we cannot allow our dissatisfaction to turn into disillusionment about our purpose in this war," followed by an order aimed at the American people to disbelieve what he described as, "enemy propaganda." From that mystifying turn of phrase, President Bush assured his audience in the White House, "I know the American people understand the stakes in Iraq. They want to win. They will support the war as long as they see a clear path to victory."

From this melange of mystification, it is now perfectly clear that President Bush has not read the newspapers for the past seven days--neither is he aware of the latest polls from America's heartland. The American people have lost confidence in his rogue presidency. Now, two out of three Americans believe that his presidency is a rapidly mushrooming disaster. By a two to one margin, American voters believe that the Democrats are better suited to deal with national security issues and terrorism than the Republicans. Why has nobody in the White House told the President that his policies in general - and his war in particular - are now unacceptable to the American people? Why is the president allowed to blather on and on about facts that fly in the face of reality?

America is a young nation, but an aging democracy. While America has suffered through rogue presidencies in its past: Pierce; Polk; Buchanan; Grant; McKinley; Harding; Coolidge; Hoover; Nixon and Reagan--it has never suffered quite as horribly; quite as tragically; quite as fatefully or quite as expensively as it is now suffering under the presidency of George W. Bush.

This conundrum affects President Bush most of all. From the president's perspective, the world appears to be distorted as if he is witnessing events through a macabre prism twisting and contorting reality into a nightmarish illusion that defies his admittedly meagre powers to discern the true state of things.

Other commentators have written that President Bush and his family have taken every wrong fork in the path of American history since they came to power through the career of his grandfather, Prescott Bush. The wrong-headed attack on American history continued in a stark line through the career of President Bush's father, George Herbert Walker Bush. But, in a sort of exponential surge of destiny, the honour of distorting American history into a lamentable caricature of its worst nightmares fell to the current President Bush.

Viewing this unravelling travesty, the elder generation of Bush loyalists have taken the extreme measure of stepping into the breech to seize the helm of the American ship of state to pilot her to safer, saner and hopefully more placid waters. Last week, the Bush family consigliore , James Baker, leaked a story about the findings of the Iraq Study Group. In their opinion, the war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, and a new policy is needed to extricate America from the quagmire. The presidential state of denial diagnosed by Robert Woodward, must be broken by the facing of certain home truths--America must leave Iraq.

That this story was leaked when it was--ie. two weeks before a crucial election - reveals the deep concerns of the Republican seniority over what appeared to be nothing less than a Bush-Cheney plan to launch World War W--by attacking Iran in the final days prior to the dreaded midterm elections in America.

When North Korea exploded her atomic device, that option--a new world war - could no longer be categorized as a rational alternative. While Bush and Cheney were prepared to wage one of their pre-emptive wars on Iran, they could not be allowed to take that step in the aftermath of North Korea going nuclear.

The equations of political algebra and diplomatic calculus had to be re-calibrated with the new factor of a nuclear regime in Pyongyang--and the embarrassing fact of the sweaty and itchy index finger of Kim Jong-Il now twitching and jerking on a nuclear trigger of his very own.

When Kim Jong-Il hit the streets of Dodge City to face off against George W. Bush, George W. Bush and his backers decided it was time to get out of Dodge.

Thanks to the policy of President Bush, post-Saddam Iraq is now being described as the, "most hellish place on earth." Thanks to the policy of President Bush, nearly three-thousand American soldiers have lost their lives in the sands of Iraq. Thanks to the policy of President Bush, the American people have invested the better part of one trillion dollars into creating the hell of Zalmay Khalilzad's Iraq. Thanks to the policy of President Bush we now know that the Interim Government of Ayad Allawi embezzled over eight-hundred million dollars during their relatively short time in office.

The polls in America predict a stunning change of power in the halls of Congress. Democrats are poised to return to the majority in the House of Representatives and to make gains in the Senate.

With Karl Rove's hand poised over the election-stealing electronic voting machines fabricated by Republican corporations, the Office for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe, now the world's pre-eminent authority on the fairness of elections, have announced their mission to supervise the American midterm elections. According to reports in Europe, the OSCE is keenly interested in the allegations of e-voting and election fraud in Bush's America.

To distract the voters, Rove has launched a campaign to sell America on the vibrancy reported to have broken out in the US economy. Now that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now hovering circa 10% above its level when Bush took office, Rove is calling it an economic miracle. Now that 6.6 million jobs have been created in the same period of time as it took Bill Clinton's administration to create over 9 million jobs, Rove is attempting to sell the US economy to the voters as a triumph for Bush and the Republicans. Pity him, for Rove has little choice, now that Iraq has gone pear-shaped.

Bad as the situation in Iraq actually is, that does not mean that Bush and Rove will not try to brand their retreat as a victory. In their terms, a military defeat is always a victory as long as they were in command.

The walls are closing in on the presidency of George Walker Bush. His old enemy, Gerhard Schroder, has just launched his book decrying the Bush presidency. Schroder reported that meetings with President Bush bordered on the impossible as his sanctimonious staff repeatedly assured his guests that the president was a, "god-fearing" man. Needless to say, Shroder records that it was difficult to do business, to meet or to negotiate with such a head of state, one that clearly fancied himself to be a divine right monarch straight out of the pages of medieval history rather than the head of the world's sole superpower.

Given the rapidly multiplying constellation of crises and criticisms hitting his presidency in its metaphorical face, President Bush has taken the extraordinary step of investing in a tract of private real estate. For the past week, the international press has been spellbound by reports that Jenna Bush, the president's daughter, has negotiated a real estate transaction in upper Paraguay for a huge ranch even by Texas standards. Now international speculation presumes that the Bushes have taken the advice of their family's consigliores to maintain a bolt-hole hideaway just in case of the eruption of problematic or discomforting political developments in their homeland.

From my undergraduate history of the Cold War, I seem to recall that after the Allied victory in World War Two, the northern reaches of Paraguay provided a refuge for Nazi war criminals--including Dr. Josef Mengele. A rogue Nazi, a rogue president--a refuge for rogues in the mists of Paraguay - is that a coincidence--or not?

(Michael Carmichael has been a professional public affairs consultant, author and broadcaster since 1968. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC's Today Programme, Hardtalk, PM, as well as numerous appearances on ITN, NPR and many European broadcasts examining politics and culture. He can be reached through his website: www.planetarymovement.org)


3. Forget Her "Pledge" Not to Impeach, She Took an Oath to Defend the Constitution Why Nancy Pelosi is Wrong
By DAVE LINDORFF/Counterpunch

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in an interview with Lesley Stahl of CBS News, said impeachment would be "off the table" if Democrats take over the House of Representatives in November, calling it a "waste of time."

She couldn't be more wrong, and most Americans know it.

While Pelosi was responding to a loaded question from Stahl, who couched impeachment in terms of Democrats' supposed desire to seek revenge if they retake Congress, Pelosi, who would become majority leader in a Democratic House, bought into Stahl's argument, saying that she'd be "satisfied" to see the president and vice president spending the remaining two years of their second term as "lame ducks."

What Stahl should have asked Pelosi was whether she thought that President Bush had violated the law and the Constitution, and whether she believed he has committed impeachable offenses.

The answer to that is clearly yes.

Rep. Pelosi must know most of the president's crimes are not partisan at all. They are crimes against Americans of all stripes, and against liberty and the Constitution.

Just take the president's order to the National Security Administration to spy on Americans without first seeking a warrant. A federal judge in Detroit has already found that the president violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--a felony--and the Fourth Amendment. That is an impeachable act, and one which Democrats and Republicans alike would punish if they understood the the implications of what the president has done. Given that the secret FISA court has only rejected a handful of warrant requests out of over 70,000 made since 1978, the only reason Bush could have decided to violate the law is that he is doing something so outrageous he knew the hand-picked, top-security-cleared FISA judges would have rejected it out of hand.

Or take the signing statements. This president has used so-called "signing statements" to render inoperative over 800 laws or parts of laws passed by Congress, claiming that he has the authority to do so because he is a commander in chief in time of war (the so-called "War" on Terror). Rep. Pelosi claims that if she becomes House leader, Democrats will want to pursue a positive, progressive political agenda, yet this will be clearly impossible if the president is allowed to simply continue issuing signing statements invalidating any laws passed by a Democratic Congress. Signing statements cannot be overridden, and if Democrats were to attempt to pass legislation outlawing them, Bush could veto that legislation--or render it inoperative with another signing statement. The only way to stop this unconstitutional usurpation of the founding principle of tripartite government is to impeach the president for blatant abuse of power.

This too, is an issue that Republicans and Democrats should agree on, for if this president is permitted to ignore laws passed by the Congress, then subsequent presidents (perhaps a President Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama?) could also do it, citing the continuing "War" on Terror, and the Bush precedent.

Does Nancy Pelosi believe that the president's lies and deceptions and the conspiracy by his administration to trick the nation into a disastrous invasion of Iraq is not grounds for impeachment? Nearly 3000 Americans have died as a result of that deceit, and nearly 40,000 have suffered grievous wounds, while the US military has been stretched to the breaking point, leaving the country unable to respond to genuine threats. Surely the author of this ongoing national nightmare must be punished, so that future presidents will not attempt to do the same thing.

These are only some of this administration's crimes. Others include:

* Bush's role in attacking, and then covering up the attack on former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame--a crime that was committed to discredit Wilson and discourage reporters from probing more deeply into his revelation that the documents used to claim Iraq was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger were obvious forgeries, and into who was behind those forgeries in the first place.

* Bush's authorization of torture as a policy for captives in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the nebulous, endless and borderless "War" on Terror. The president, in an act of desperation, has gotten the currently Republican Congress to ram through a bill granting retroactive immunity to all those, including himself, who authorized or engaged in torture, but this should not deter a Democratic Congress from seeking impeachment for an action that remains a violation of international law, that places American troops at greater risk, and that has destroyed America's image around the globe.

* Bush's criminally negligent handling of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

* The rot of corruption in the administration, highlighted by the Abramoff lobbying scandals, which clearly reach right into the Oval Office, despite the president's initial lie that he didn't know Jack Abramoff.

* Bush's refusal to testify under oath and on the record before the 9-11 Commission, and his refusal to provide officials and documents demanded by the commission regarding what the administration knew before the attacks and how it responded to what it knew. This obstructionism by the White House has been called close to an act of treason by former Sen. Bob Graham, who until the end of 2002 was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and who has said if he were currently in the House would be the subject of a bill of impeachment.

Rep. Pelosi may think Americans don't want impeachment, but, like many Democratic leaders, she may be simply out of touch. Indeed, the congresswoman will find a resolution on impeachment on her own ballot when she goes home to San Francisco to vote this November (a resolution that is likely to pass handily). Meanwhile, a new Newsweek magazine poll finds that fully 51 percent of all Americans believe that the president should be impeached--more than half of them saying this should be a priority. That same poll finds that 20 percent of Republicans think the president should be impeached, with one in four of those saying it should be a priority for the next Congress.

These are astonishing figures when you consider that support for impeachment of President Bill Clinton never got higher than 36 percent, even at the height of his impeachment process.

Maybe Rep. Pelosi should start listening to the voters, instead of to her campaign strategists.

More importantly, she and other Democratic-and Republican--members of the House should recall that oath they took when they assumed office, which commits them to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

The Constitution these days is under relentless assault by an enemy in the White House. Defending it is not a "waste of time" Ms. Pelosi; it is your sworn duty.

(Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com)