Friday, July 13, 2007
Impeachment
As this overly long but still accurate article points out, Bush's unpopularity (defined as the percentage of poll respondents who state they disapprove of his conduct) has exceeded that of every president since polling began, except for Nixon's during his last days, and even then, only by a point. Margins of error and the prevailing winds of any given day produce different figures, but Bush is generally at 26% positive, 66% negative. Conservatives might blame the immigration bill and Bush's (somewhat surprising) refusal to demonize a vast swath of the American population, but rational people know better.
Glenn Greenwald and the contributors for DailyKos frequently muse about the identity of the "dead-enders" who cling tenaciously to their president inerrant. Apparently a quarter of the sentient public constitutes a basis of rump support that will stand by the glorious leader forever--as long as all the scandals and failures plow forward in the same predictable, unidirectional way. As long as the cliff we drive off of is Mt. Surge and not Mt. National Health Insurance, the GOP base will never renounce their support for the resolute war leader, whose complete lack of interiority is for them his paramount virtue. That means that one-quarter of the US population will not only tolerate but actively cheer a record of lawlessness and radical abuses of power. (This is the segment Rudy Giuliani is courting, hoping his authoritarian fear-mongering will get another quarter of the electorate to forget it's not 2002).
For a dozen reasons, a goodly proportion of the media continues to take the Bush Administration's statements at face value. That Tony Snow glided so effortlessly into his new role as White House spokesman from his old one as...auxiliary White House spokesman for Faux News doesn't even get much of a mention anymore. But the New York Times which created the position of public editor partly in response to its gullible and cozy reporting of pre-war Iraq intelligence now has in reporter Michael Gordon a Lieberman-esque zealot crusading for war with Iran by uncritically regurgitating military machinations about that country's stealth involvement in the insurgency. Joe Klein of Time and several Washington Post columnists also do their best to cheer on the neocon wet dream, functioning more or less as a collective Maureen Dowd to the self-style conservatives' Ann Coulter. Rather than make extraordinary, inflammatory statements as Coulter does about Democrats, they subtly, even cattily, reinforce Republican talking points about the war, its architects and its inevitable end by continually framing opponents as quavering surrenderistas who lack the steely courage of manly men like Fred Thompson or the guileless Scooter Libby, whose ardent love of country rightly ought to have trumped any verdict pronouncing guilt for whatever felonies.
This miasma of dynamics has produced a climate where talk of impeachment has bubbled up towards a critical mass, wherein it is no longer the province of the fringe (Lyndon LaRouche; Dennis Kucinich, maybe) and may now be the pet cause of the vanguard.
It's not just the progressive blogosphere anymore. Television gasbags can fudge the numbers, but supporters of impeachment now number almost forty percent of the general population, with greater strength among the young. We're apparently caught in a parallel dimension to 1998, when in spite of weak public support, a Republican congress impeached a president for 'crimes' that are tragicomically pathetic compared to the systemic collapse of government as an institution charged with executing policies for the sake of the national good.
The media, for their part, operate more like the fawning coterie of Versailles than a check on governmental abuses and lies. It is only the relentless criticism from progressive bloggers that has forced the clubby Washington correspondents' pool to re-evaluate its place vis-a-vis the people who are supposed to be their amiable adversaries, with noted discomfort among many national reporters at the prospect of attending the ribbon-cutting at the new White House press room--a purely ceremonial event, dedicated to the ritual of news management, at which Bush did not even take any questions. Still--they supported a commutation/pardon for Libby, lied and said most Americans did too, and it doesn't take a genius to guess that they will fight impeachment tooth and nail, because loyalty is the king of virtues in Washington and one does not let one's own fall.
In any case, there are multiple objections to impeachment, many of them good. The best one is that there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate, and you need 66 to remove someone from office. So barring his death, Bush will remain as president until January 20, 2009 (meaning a mind-boggling 18 more months of this shit). The prospect of President Cheney is less than appealing, and the feasibility of some kind of double impeachment strains credulity. Purging the entire cabinet in some kind of mass sweep would be delicious, but even more dubious. Entering a pattern where opposition parties impeach the sitting president would siphon off a lot of energy from 'real' matters, like health care. And not to be a cynic, but the damage is done: Iraq is a conflagration that may actually become a full-on genocide, the Supreme Court might as well have Roger B. Taney sitting on it, and the timid Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything but submit toothless, Third Way-style adjustments to the war's conduct for the inevitable veto.
However, the crystallizing irony is that impeachment exists for a reason, and if not now, when? The most frustrating thing about power-worshiping media practices is the naive and giddy belief in the endless elasticity of the Republic. The people in charge and their ideological cohorts are incompetent and morally bankrupt, they are draining the government to finance their imperialistic boondoggle, their psychotic musings on "how we should have done more to kill 18-35-year old Sunni men" or how war with Iran is the answer are truly terrifying, and--most of all--they don't give a shit about the rule of law. They politicize every government agency, they lie and dissemble when questioned, concealing their tracks, pardoning their foot soldiers and evaporating public trust in government. This is how empires fall from within.
One can envision an easy future where a nuclear attack on a US city triggers a chain of events that makes the current perpetual state of emergency analogous to the relation between Clinton's crime(s) to Bush's. The Constitution is literally suspended, the full brunt of our military might is turned on the enemies within and the media-industrial complex's corporate paymasters self-censor any possible critiques. These cliches are sophomoric for a reason; it is entirely possible. Impeachment must always be viewed not as payback against Bush-as-inarticulate-tyrant or Bush-as-enabler, but as the final, almost desperate, gesture against the total corrosion of a system designed more than two centuries ago as the superior check on the ability of the powerful to rewrite the rules and then break them anyway.
We can demand an immediate withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, or that Harriet Miers comply with a subpoena or that Bush stop the practice of signing statements. None of the above will happen, and the template is now secured: future presidents can invoke terrorism as a justification to do whatever they want, get the media to acquiesce with almost no effort, and use their years in office to appoint with impunity a judiciary composed of like-minded people who will vet and validate their decisions. Thus will the 'American experiment' (as it were) dissolve into a new normality. The next half-century depends on Justices Stevens and Ginsburg surviving for another year and a half, and for our political class to align itself with the rational three-quarters of the population who oppose the war, if not the growing plurality who can no longer tolerate this.
Glenn Greenwald and the contributors for DailyKos frequently muse about the identity of the "dead-enders" who cling tenaciously to their president inerrant. Apparently a quarter of the sentient public constitutes a basis of rump support that will stand by the glorious leader forever--as long as all the scandals and failures plow forward in the same predictable, unidirectional way. As long as the cliff we drive off of is Mt. Surge and not Mt. National Health Insurance, the GOP base will never renounce their support for the resolute war leader, whose complete lack of interiority is for them his paramount virtue. That means that one-quarter of the US population will not only tolerate but actively cheer a record of lawlessness and radical abuses of power. (This is the segment Rudy Giuliani is courting, hoping his authoritarian fear-mongering will get another quarter of the electorate to forget it's not 2002).
For a dozen reasons, a goodly proportion of the media continues to take the Bush Administration's statements at face value. That Tony Snow glided so effortlessly into his new role as White House spokesman from his old one as...auxiliary White House spokesman for Faux News doesn't even get much of a mention anymore. But the New York Times which created the position of public editor partly in response to its gullible and cozy reporting of pre-war Iraq intelligence now has in reporter Michael Gordon a Lieberman-esque zealot crusading for war with Iran by uncritically regurgitating military machinations about that country's stealth involvement in the insurgency. Joe Klein of Time and several Washington Post columnists also do their best to cheer on the neocon wet dream, functioning more or less as a collective Maureen Dowd to the self-style conservatives' Ann Coulter. Rather than make extraordinary, inflammatory statements as Coulter does about Democrats, they subtly, even cattily, reinforce Republican talking points about the war, its architects and its inevitable end by continually framing opponents as quavering surrenderistas who lack the steely courage of manly men like Fred Thompson or the guileless Scooter Libby, whose ardent love of country rightly ought to have trumped any verdict pronouncing guilt for whatever felonies.
This miasma of dynamics has produced a climate where talk of impeachment has bubbled up towards a critical mass, wherein it is no longer the province of the fringe (Lyndon LaRouche; Dennis Kucinich, maybe) and may now be the pet cause of the vanguard.
It's not just the progressive blogosphere anymore. Television gasbags can fudge the numbers, but supporters of impeachment now number almost forty percent of the general population, with greater strength among the young. We're apparently caught in a parallel dimension to 1998, when in spite of weak public support, a Republican congress impeached a president for 'crimes' that are tragicomically pathetic compared to the systemic collapse of government as an institution charged with executing policies for the sake of the national good.
The media, for their part, operate more like the fawning coterie of Versailles than a check on governmental abuses and lies. It is only the relentless criticism from progressive bloggers that has forced the clubby Washington correspondents' pool to re-evaluate its place vis-a-vis the people who are supposed to be their amiable adversaries, with noted discomfort among many national reporters at the prospect of attending the ribbon-cutting at the new White House press room--a purely ceremonial event, dedicated to the ritual of news management, at which Bush did not even take any questions. Still--they supported a commutation/pardon for Libby, lied and said most Americans did too, and it doesn't take a genius to guess that they will fight impeachment tooth and nail, because loyalty is the king of virtues in Washington and one does not let one's own fall.
In any case, there are multiple objections to impeachment, many of them good. The best one is that there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate, and you need 66 to remove someone from office. So barring his death, Bush will remain as president until January 20, 2009 (meaning a mind-boggling 18 more months of this shit). The prospect of President Cheney is less than appealing, and the feasibility of some kind of double impeachment strains credulity. Purging the entire cabinet in some kind of mass sweep would be delicious, but even more dubious. Entering a pattern where opposition parties impeach the sitting president would siphon off a lot of energy from 'real' matters, like health care. And not to be a cynic, but the damage is done: Iraq is a conflagration that may actually become a full-on genocide, the Supreme Court might as well have Roger B. Taney sitting on it, and the timid Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything but submit toothless, Third Way-style adjustments to the war's conduct for the inevitable veto.
However, the crystallizing irony is that impeachment exists for a reason, and if not now, when? The most frustrating thing about power-worshiping media practices is the naive and giddy belief in the endless elasticity of the Republic. The people in charge and their ideological cohorts are incompetent and morally bankrupt, they are draining the government to finance their imperialistic boondoggle, their psychotic musings on "how we should have done more to kill 18-35-year old Sunni men" or how war with Iran is the answer are truly terrifying, and--most of all--they don't give a shit about the rule of law. They politicize every government agency, they lie and dissemble when questioned, concealing their tracks, pardoning their foot soldiers and evaporating public trust in government. This is how empires fall from within.
One can envision an easy future where a nuclear attack on a US city triggers a chain of events that makes the current perpetual state of emergency analogous to the relation between Clinton's crime(s) to Bush's. The Constitution is literally suspended, the full brunt of our military might is turned on the enemies within and the media-industrial complex's corporate paymasters self-censor any possible critiques. These cliches are sophomoric for a reason; it is entirely possible. Impeachment must always be viewed not as payback against Bush-as-inarticulate-tyrant or Bush-as-enabler, but as the final, almost desperate, gesture against the total corrosion of a system designed more than two centuries ago as the superior check on the ability of the powerful to rewrite the rules and then break them anyway.
We can demand an immediate withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, or that Harriet Miers comply with a subpoena or that Bush stop the practice of signing statements. None of the above will happen, and the template is now secured: future presidents can invoke terrorism as a justification to do whatever they want, get the media to acquiesce with almost no effort, and use their years in office to appoint with impunity a judiciary composed of like-minded people who will vet and validate their decisions. Thus will the 'American experiment' (as it were) dissolve into a new normality. The next half-century depends on Justices Stevens and Ginsburg surviving for another year and a half, and for our political class to align itself with the rational three-quarters of the population who oppose the war, if not the growing plurality who can no longer tolerate this.
