2006: The Impeachment of George Bush

The titular "impeachment," of course, was declared "off the table" by incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and off the table it stayed, though progressives (myself obviously included) enjoyed fulminating about it for the next couple years. Less known, perhaps, is that Democrats similarly decided the impeachment of Ronald Reagan was off the table. Bill Clinton likewise declined to prosecute the crimes of the first Bush Administration. And President Obama has famously declared that he prefers looking forward, not backward, even as the rest of the world demands accountability for the Lesser Bush Administration's crimes against humanity. What have the Democrats ever gained from keeping such matters off our national table? Perhaps more to the point, what is it they prefer to keep on it?

In 1961, following the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Kennedy told CIA Director Allen Dulles, “In a parliamentary government, I'd have to resign. But in this government I can't, so you have to go.” Of course, just a few years later, JFK had to go, and Dulles was back in government service as a member of the Warren Commission, helping to cover up his ex-boss’s murder.

2006: Hate Sketch

Five years later, and I don't think I've seen another political cartoon that pissed me off as much as this one...so congratulations, McKee!

After 17 years in the political cartoon business, I thought I’d seen it all. But I can’t remember seeing as disgraceful a cartoon in an American newspaper as Rick McKee’s depiction of “The Left” choosing to pretend there is no terrorist threat (see above). Okay, I can think of some that were equally disgraceful, but none that were more so.

Look, I understand how political cartoons work. They’re supposed to provoke, anger, exaggerate. Many times I’ve found myself ticked off when some cartoonist deftly skewers my point of view–and then I have to catch myself and smile. But this is different, and I think I can explain why I think McKee’s cartoon crosses the line.

2006: Moral Calculus

Yet another iteration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. When it comes to the application of force, the neocons managed to combine an unseemly eagerness with an alarming incompetence and an approach to diplomacy that managed to dismay allies and embolden adversaries. Here's another look at how it was done when the "grownups" were in charge:

The destruction of Lebanon can be added to the list of blunders and tragedies made possible by the Bush administration’s dangerous incompetence. It seems like just a few months ago that Lebanon was Exhibit A in the neocons’ argument that democracy was sweeping the Middle East because Our Policy Is Working and the troops will be coming home to tickertape parades any day now. So, again –how’s that going?

2006: Pot Kettle Black

The title to this post comes from a song by the Great American Rock Band, Wilco. Meanwhile, the end to GOP majorities in the legislative branch, to put it mildly, didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. One could argue that, under Nancy Pelosi, the Dems did a better job of policing their own side's ethical violations. One could also argue that, under Barack Obama, the White House has ended up perpetuating some of the Bush Administration's worst policies on civil liberties. What one can't argue is that the GOP has covered itself in glory since returning to power, but one is welcome to try....

Pot kettle black. It seems to be the last arrow in their quiver. As indictments fly within the beltway, as investigations mount and trials commence, as the president publicly admits he broke the law and defies anyone to do a thing about it, GOP apologists have nothing left to say but “Pot kettle black!”

It would be absurd, of course, to argue that one political party has a monopoly on malfeasance and corruption. This writer and this publication have criticized the Democrats on these grounds for decades now. And one needs to be careful when tossing around words like “unprecedented” when it comes to the crimes of politicians. But “pot kettle black,” as a response to the current situation is so inadequate, it’s pathetic.

Really, it’s put up or shut up time. We have a constitutional crisis on our hands. The president is claiming he has the power to overrule any congressional statute, to ignore any court ruling. The question now for Republicans is whether they put their loyalty to the party over their loyalty to the Constitution. And for far too many, the answer is, “sure, why not!”

2006: Don Knotts and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Published in the Santa Cruz Comic News on the cusp of the 2006 midterm elections. As for my comments regarding potential prosecutions of Bushistas, well, hope springs eternal. But you never know....:

Image by Drew Freidman

What does the late Don Knotts have in common with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Spanish-language DJ El Piolin, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Give up? The answer is that they’re all symbolic of the Bush Administration’s willingness to put its own political survival ahead of the national interest.

Of course, that’s no surprise in itself. By now at least two out of every three Americans realizes that Bush and his cronies can’t be trusted with our national security, our national treasury, our national integrity or our national infrastructure (the rest of you can do Google searches on “Iraq + WMD,” “budget deficit,” “Abu Ghraib” and “Katrina”).

The thing is, the Bush Republicans are starting to get a little desperate these days. It reminds me of a recent news story involving Silvio Berlusconi. Even though Italians voted him out of office, he plans to keep on showing up every day at the Prime Minister’s office and going to work. In a sense, that’s what Bush has been doing since Day One: insisting he’s the President, no matter what the voters said.

But like Berlusconi, the Bushistas face the very real possibility of prosecution if the opposition party takes over. Flip fifteen House seats and/or six Senate seats this fall, and all of a sudden you have Democrats with subpoena power – with a fairly juicy set of scandals to investigate, all swept under the rug to date by Bushie’s rubber-stamp Congress.

2006: Time Crunch

From 2005 to 2007 I wrote for Tucson Business Edge, a monthly supplement to the late Tucson Citizen. Mostly these were profiles of business owners, but occasionally I was assigned a longer piece. Not all of them need to be preserved here, but this one seems to bring up some interesting issues. It's pretty long because of the OTOH/OTOH journalistic conventions, but if you're underemployed, maybe you've got time to read it.

What if you came home from work on October 24th and took the rest of the year off? Suppose you just unplugged from the office, turned off the cellphone, and spent time with your family until after New Year’s Day. If you did that, you’d be enjoying the same amount of time off every year as the average European worker.

“The Europeans average about six weeks vacation,” says Deborah Figart, a professor at Stockton College in New Jersey. “And in the United States, if you’re on the job long enough – which is typically two to three years – the average is about two weeks.”

In a nutshell,” says Figart, “the Japanese used to be the workaholics of the world, and the data and studies are showing that in the United States, now we are the workaholics of the world. And families are having a very difficult time, trying to balance work and family and all the demands. And folks are cutting their vacations short, and they’re taking their cellphones with them, and they’re working out of their cars. And it’s becoming a nation of workaholics, the United States.”

2006: The Desiccated Alfalfa Stalk

Another one from the good old Santa Cruz Comic News. Aside from my bad predictions about the then-impending election, this remains timely.

One day in 1787, as he walked out of the constitutional convention, Benjamin Franklin was stopped by a woman who asked, "What sort of government have you given us? A republic or a monarchy?" He replied, "A republic–if you can keep it."

Well, we haven't. We lost our republic on September 29, 2006.

On that date our Congress voted not just to legalize torture–as if that wasn't shame enough–but to allow one man, the 43rd President, to define what is and isn't torture. He may now designate anyone he chooses to be an "enemy combatant"–even a US citizen–and lock that person up for life, with no charges or trial.

The right to habeas corpus, a pillar of our system of jurisprudence since the year twelve hundred and fifteen, is now dead. As the ACLU helpfully noted: "The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions."

When Nixon resigned, when Clinton was impeached, we were told: this is a nation of laws, not men. No longer.

Of late, many have wondered what would become of our simmering constitutional crisis of illegal wiretaps and imperious "signing statements." How would we deal with a president who vows to defy the Congress and the courts? The answer is, we won't. This Congress (virtually every Republican, and about a quarter of the Democrats) didn't simply vote to allow any sort of torture that George Bush cares to assert is something other than torture. They legalized it retroactively.

All the stomach-turning horrors committed in our names: Children raped at Abu Ghraib, on videotapes too shocking to release. Prisoners beaten to death, their bodies mutilated for sport. Jose Padilla freezing naked on the floor of his cell, injected with psychiatric drugs, charged with no crime. Elderly Afghan men, denounced by rival clans, delivered to Guantanamo to sit in a cage for years before being released. Vicious dogs attacking naked, cowering men. German or Canadian citizens, kidnapped and rendered to ghoulish torture chambers in Egypt or Syria, eventually found innocent. Guns to the heads of prisoners' children to compel capitulation. Waterboarding, a crime against humanity in Word War II, now a "no-brainer" to our veep. Human limbs, beaten to a pulp, their owners expiring of heart failure. The iconic, hooded figure, hooked to electrodes, standing for hours atop a stool, told it would be his death the moment he stumbled off.

Who will be accountable for this? Nobody. We are a republic no longer.

The "Republicans" who rule us, should they retain their grip on the legislative branch, will surely do more to sweep these monstrosities under the rug, legalize retroactively the other crimes of their Dear Leader and his minions, give us more judges who smile benignly on such petty controversies. And yet?

And yet the very next day, in one of those bittersweet ironies that fill the pages of history, their grip began to loosen. One of their own was revealed as a drunken, lecherous sexual predator, grooming the teenaged pages on Capitol Hill for his future seductions. His party leadership stood accused not just of the usual cover-up, but of crass negligence and astonishingly cynical ploys to retain his Florida seat and his fundraising prowess. And the penultimate desiccated alfalfa stalk was placed atop the dromedary's spinal column, as an unholy bellow issued forth from the overburdened beast.

Had the Foley firestorm come a week earlier, it's doubtful they could have mustered the votes to shred our Constitution with but a few whimpers of disapproval heard in the galleries. But shred it they did, and then came the firestorm. Scandal after scandal, sometimes several new ones per day, bales of hay being dropped on the poor dead camel and his broken back.

The Congresscritter who cheated on his wife and choked his mistress. The Christian legislator who insulted the Jews and sent an aide to claim that his boss was a more observant Jew than any of them. The lobbyist daughter whose offices were raided. The land scams that enriched their well-connected patrons. The Senator with a petty cash fund bigger than Richard Nixon's. The candidate who assaulted a woman in a parking lot. The one who sent out letters to intimidate Latino voters. The anti-abortion ad that called black women "ho's." The incumbent who threatened to slap her wheelchair-bound opponent. The indicted Congresscritter who refused to resign. The mocking of a Parkinson's victim. And so many, many more.

All this on top of the pre-Foley scandals involving DeLay, Abramoff, Cunningham, and a burgeoning cast of characters. And all of that on top of, as pundit Michael Kinsley once quipped, the real scandal in Washington: what's legal.

It was almost as if the Democrats' fondest dream were about to come true: an election dropped in their laps, in which the Republicans came to be so despised that the Democrats didn't even have to bother to stand for something other than "We're not as bad as them."

All right, that's not entirely fair. All kinds of Democrats stand for all sorts of worthy policies; you can find them on their websites. But the party leaders, who fund the campaigns, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into looking at polls that tell them the grotesque, unending Iraq War is hugely unpopular. Who knew?

This rant is being typed out in the last fortnight of the campaign, but you are probably reading it after the election results have come in. As I write, the Repubs are relying on their reinforcements, what they wryly called their "backlash insurance:" the mighty wurlitzer of their media machine, their army of church-recruited GOTV volunteers, their computer-enhanced gerrymandering of the electoral map, their majority of secretaries of state to oversee elections; their intimidation and race-baiting tactics to suppress turnout, a torrent of cash for negative campaign ads, and their amoral willingness to say any goddamned thing, no matter how libelous, mendacious, despicable and revolting, if it helps them to win. Hey, it's worked before.

Oh, and did I mention the voting machines? I believe it may have come up before: Elephant-friendly corporations have privatized 40% of the vote count. Trust them, they would never abuse that power.

Prognostication is risky, and so is conspiracy theory, but I like to live dangerously. Tell you what: if I controlled 40% of the vote count, I would let the other guys win one every once in a while, just to throw them off. So my prediction is, the Demos take the House, by quite a wide margin, in fact. Let Waxman and Conyers and Rangell have their committee chairs and issue their subpoenas. They will be stonewalled in the corridors of power and belittled in the media.

The Senate, which advises and consents to our foreign policies and our judicial nominees, will remain in Dick Cheney's hands. The seats of Missouri, Tennessee, and/or Virginia will be too close to call on Election Eve and will fall comfortably in the red column the next day. Wouldn't even matter if McCaskill, Ford and Webb had twelve-point leads, either; just ask Max Cleland.

Hope I'm wrong about that, but if I'm not, our civil liberties, our moral standing and our treasury will suffer further degradation. If the Repubs hold both houses, double that, and renew your passport. If the Demos take both of them away, don't expect miracles. If the rouged elephants actually lose both houses, I will believe it is because the people who run this country have come to believe that the Repubs are bad for business. Happens sometimes; we will just have to take advantage of this historical moment.

But that is in fact our only hope now. However flawed our opposition party, they can be goaded into actually opposing; a combination of carrots and sticks works on most donkeys. There is a fresh new crop of candidates, beholden not to party elders but to grassroots fundraising, goosed by the networking possibilities of the Internet. They will be a small group, but whether Joe Lieberman lives to fight another day, his primary defeat sent a powerful message to the slightly less insane wing of the corporate duopoly: fear the voters. And as they always say in Washington, it's better to be feared than loved.

So what will it be, a monarchy or a republic? A republic, if we can get it back.