Author: The Walrus

John Nichols, over at The Nation, reports that several Vermont towns have resolved that Bush should be impeached. He mentions four towns, each of which were inspired by the example of

Voters in the town of Newfane, where the movement began, endors[ing] impeachment by a resounding margin. The paper ballot vote was 121-29

. . .

Though it is a little-known and even less-used power, state legislatures can officially forward impeachment resolutions to Congress.

The impeachment question has come up more and more over the last few weeks, as Harold Meyerson notes in his column at the Washington Post:

It’s all over the blogosphere. It’s the cover story in the current Harper’s. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed an impeachment resolution. Antiwar activists, civil libertarians, all the usual-suspect constituencies have growing impeachment tendencies. But it’s reaching beyond the usual suspects

At first, I admit I am excited about these developments. Bush has, after all, clearly misled (the term I guess we are all using when there isn’t quite enough evidence to say “lied”) us about a number of important issues. Nichols reprints the Vermont resolution, which has a brief list of the items, but as Meyerson notes the standout item is the domestic wiretapping program, because it so clearly violates the law. At first, then, there seems to be a solid case for at the very least opening impeachment proceedings.

Yet in both pieces we also see why this would be a tactically questionable move. From Nichols:

U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders . . . responded to the call from the towns with an acknowledgement that Bush “has been a disaster for our country, and a number of actions that he has taken may very well not have been legal.” Yet . . . Sanders said that Republican control of the House and Senate makes it “impractical to talk about impeachment” at this point.

In other words, whatever the facts of the case, nothing will get done about it while Republicans control Congress. Meyerson moves from this conclusion to the assertion that

Democrats need to win in November — a goal that looks increasingly within reach, and the goal on which the growing legions of Bush haters should focus their attentions. To dwell on impeachment now would be to drain energy from the election efforts that need to succeed if impeachment is ever truly to be on the agenda. To insist on support for impeachment as a litmus test for Democratic candidates would be to impede those efforts altogether.

Which I think is absolutely true. The Democrats retaking Congress is far and away the best hope for any American who is troubled by the way things are going. The problem, of course, is that Bush may actually be guilty of crimes, that his behavior might merit impeachment, and that he seems to be allowed to go unpunished because his party runs the country. Even though I understand the tactical merit of remaining focused on the elections, it is a tragedy that the laws of our nation have stopped applying to the President. The Republicans should be ashamed of themselves. Their constituents should be ashamed of them. So ashamed that they do something about it. In November.

This doesn’t look very good for anybody:

Iran’s chief negotiator renewed a threat to interrupt petroleum exports if the IAEA board of governors followed through on its vote last month to report Iran to the Security Council pending a last stab at a diplomatic solution. Iran is the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“If we are referred to the Security Council, problems might occur for others as well as us,” Ali Larijani said at a news conference. “We would not like to use our oil as a weapon. We would not like to make other countries suffer.”

How mafia-esque of him. Don’t worry, the United States is always ready to descend to any dictatorship’s level:

“The Iran regime must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences,” Bolton said at the convention of a pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Reuters news agency reported. He said the United States was prepared to “use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat.” President Bush has repeatedly said the possibility of military strikes remains “on the table” even as Washington endorsed an intense international diplomatic effort.

While this dynamic is obviously unhelpful, it is worth unpacking the issues here to see just how badly Bush has handled this problem. If you have a large, oil-wealthy nation whose theocratic rulers are obsessed with appearing strong, proud, and courageous, and then you threaten them to bend them to your will, what exactly do you expect to happen? Mr. Larijani makes an enlightening statement at the end of the piece:

He repeatedly warned, however, that Iran would not tolerate the issue of its program being sent to the Security Council, given the humiliations neighboring Iraq endured during forced inspections through the 1990s.

“But we’re not willing to be like Iraq, to let them come into the country whenever they want and look in any corner they want,” he said.

This is the crux of the matter. Iran’s primary goal is to appear strong, and to retain their self-determination. We Americans can understand that. Rather than planting our feet and digging in on the nuclear issue, we must recognize that the problem here is the government of Iran, and until the Iranian people decide to change that, there is relatively little we can do. When we faced a similar problem with the USSR, we had a highly effective nuclear policy: Mutually Assured Destruction. Until political change comes to Iran, that is the way to keep them from wanting to develop nuclear weapons.

This New York Times piece tries to strike an optimistic tone, but really, the facts of the situation are not all that great:

In the past three years, Dr. ElBaradei noted today, the agency has been conducting intensive investigations of Iran’s nuclear program to provide assurances about its peaceful nature.

“During these investigations, the agency has not seen indications of diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices,” he said. “Regrettably, however, after three years of intensive verification, there remain uncertainties with regard to both the scope and the nature of Iran’s nuclear program.”

. . .

Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in November 2004 to voluntarily freeze all of its uranium conversion, enrichment and reprocessing activities. But when promised economic and political rewards were not forthcoming, Iran broke the agreement. It restarted uranium conversion last August and then began tests of enriching uranium on Feb. 11.

Iran believes it has the right to pursue nuclear research. The U.S. and Europe would really rather it didn’t. We are faced with bribing them, threatening them, or invading them to prevent this. Or we could admit that they will probably move ahead with the research no matter what, and focus on social and humanitarian efforts in Iran with an eye towards long term regime change.

As you can tell from the title of my blog, I am a Liberal. While you might expect this to make me forever an enemy of conservatives, that just isn’t the case. I know that the conservatives out there must be having a hard time these last few weeks. Scandals have rocked their senate, their house, and even their White House. Their favored son has fumbled and bobbled so many of his jobs that it can be hard to find something he did right.

I’m here to open my arms to my conservative brothers and say: forgiveness can be yours. You have a chance in the upcoming election to erase the mistakes of the past and start out on a better path. That’s right, I’m joining other progressive bloggers in offering amnesty, as part of Conservative Amnesty Month. Whether you want to change parties, or you just recognize the disastrous calamity that has befallen our government as a result of your votes, I stand ready to accept you. There are so many places to find amnesty for your past votes:

• Evil Bobby has mentioned that he will forgive you.
• The Mad Prophet has also opened his heart
• At Gray Does Matter the amnesty is open as well

Please, come back to the reality based community. Vote for your local Democrat and all will be forgiven. I think we can all agree that our nation needs a fresh start.

George Will’s column in the Washington Post this Sunday was as offensive as it was incoherent. His subject was John Edwards, specifically his efforts to fight poverty. At least, I think that was his subject. Hard to be sure:

Most Americans seem to regard as the only searing economic injustice the violation of their constitutional right — surely it is in the Bill of Rights — to cheap gasoline. But Edwards believes attacking poverty can be politically energizing if, by stressing “work, responsibility, family,” the attack “is built around a value system the nation embraces.”

What? After reading this a few times, I really don’t know what to say. The first sentence seems to be mocking Americans who are upset that gasoline prices are going up. The second sentence makes Edwards sound totally right–who doesn’t want to fight poverty by promoting “work, responsibility, and family?” But the million-dollar question is: why are these thoughts related? Why does Will think that this constitutes a coherent paragraph? The world may never know.

After the incoherence, the offense:

The new paradigm is of behavior-driven poverty that results from individuals’ nonmaterial deficits. It results from a scarcity of certain habits and mores — punctuality, hygiene, industriousness, deferral of gratification, etc. — that are not developed in disorganized homes.

Edwards, who does not recognize the name James Q. Wilson, may have missed this paradigm shift. Many people in public life, and almost all those with presidential ambitions, are too busy for the study and reflection necessary for mastering any subject.

This new poverty paradigm (i.e. the poor are lazy) results, according to Will, from “spending at least $6.6 trillion on poverty-related programs in the four decades since President Johnson declared the ‘war on poverty’.” I hypothesize a different possible explanation: Will is the one who lacks the necessary mastery of this subject, and Edwards, who has spent a great deal of time and effort acquainting himself with the realities of poverty in this country, understands that every American can and should be lifted out of poverty. Rather than blaming the victim, and making ridiculous generalizations that adumbrate–dare I say it–somewhat racist sentiments, Edwards is trying to make a difference.

Of course, the column wouldn’t be complete without a final incomprehensible graf:

But the idea that the candidate’s persona is primary and that issues are secondary is a mistake made by some Democrats who yearn for another John Kennedy. He was a talented but quite traditional politician whom many Democrats wrongly remember as proving that charisma trumps substantive politics. Edwards, who has been called Kennedyesque, has a stake in that yearning.

George W. Bush is the ultimate “character-driven” President, so I think Will is pretty overtly wrong here. Wrong, that is, insofar as I can decipher any particular rational thought at all.

This Washington Post story runs under the catchy headline:

Administration Revives Dispute Over Eavesdropping Authority

I was intrigued. Why, I wondered, would the administration want to talk about this any more? And what “debate?” Well, as I should have expected, the “debate” was silly and wholly irrelevant to the facts of the case.

the Bush administration yesterday reopened a dispute about whether it tried and failed to obtain direct congressional authority for use of the president’s war-making powers on U.S. territory.

So we aren’t actually debating whether the warrantless wiretapping was illegal or not. And we’re not debating the FISA law, or the fact that warrantless wiretapping occurred. What exactly are we debating? Essentially, whether or not the administration knew that their actions would not be legal. That’s the only thing the “asking for permission” factor would demonstrate. But warrantless wiretaps are illegal whether or not the President knows that they are.

The rest of the article is just he-said he-said journalism:

“Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote” on Sept. 14, 2001, Daschle wrote, the White House asked to insert the words “in the United States” into the use-of-force resolution. “I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority,” Daschle added. “I refused.”

. . .

Reached by telephone last night, [David] Crane [aide to Trent Lott, who Daschle’s office said brought the request to them] said he has “absolutely no recollection of that ever having occurred.” Though he took part in negotiations over the use-of-force resolution, Crane said, he had been reassigned to another task before the resolution reached the Senate floor.

Oh, good. No one knows what happened about an irrelevant question. What kind of news is this? Why not take a moment to talk about whether or not violating the law is illegal, or even doing a little background on whether it makes sense to classify wiretapping in the United States as a use of force?

This column from David Broder is full of wistful reminiscences about the good old days, when even though people disagreed everything in Washington was more or less peachy:

But on the hustings, he said, people hunger for a return to the spirit of the Reagan years, when Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan quarreled over policy but then shared stories and trust.

How nice. The conceit of Broder’s column is that the middle way is the best way, and that it makes people antsy when the political parties disagree with each other. The value-neutral measure of political success is just getting something, anything, done:

the Republican-controlled legislature ended its regular session in 2005 deadlocked over the state Supreme Court funding mandate, Sebelius, a Democrat, called the lawmakers into a special summer session. They cobbled together a $148 million fix, and when the court said that was still inadequate, something dramatic happened.

“The legislative leaders of both parties said, ‘We have to have a plan, and we want to be at the table when it’s hammered out,’ ” Sebelius said. The result: In February, a new, bipartisan proposal for a three-year boost in school budgets . . .

Associated Press reporter John Milburn wrote, “Unlike previous years, when school finance plans were hatched by dissident Republicans and a handful of Democrats and sometimes tended to reflect narrow interests legislative leaders put their heads together with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius from the get-go to find a solution.”

Let me get this straight. Republicans deadlock the legislature. The compromise fix is inadequate. Everyone thinks they look stupid. They are right. They come up with a budget that works. Isn’t it nice when everyone plays nice together?

Except, Broder seems to be forgetting who was at fault–the “Republican-controlled legislature.” It was they who deadlocked over the mandate, they who watered down the fix to make it inadequate, and they who finally had to do the right thing out of shame. When one party is in charge, i.e. the Republicans in Washington right now, they have the power to make things happen. Or not. For David to diffuse the blame for broken government around equally is dishonest.

And there is the requisite Hillary bashing:

But what about Hillary Rodham Clinton? She leads all the early polls for the Democratic nomination. But can she avoid being seen simply as a battle-scarred veteran of the partisan Washington wars? Is there anything in her record that speaks to the hunger for consensus?

Again, no mention of whether the battles that scarred her were noble and right, or not. The hunger for consensus, so lionized by Broder in this column, is not an end in itself. Compromise with tyranny, or with insanity, is not honorable–it is cowardly. Hillary knows that. Broder, not so much.