Obviously, this is a forum and site dedicated to advocating for impeachment, but no one is preventing you from arguing against impeachment here.

The thing is, you aren’t. Instead, you seem to feel Bush or Frist’s fleeting feelings of disquiet about torture and abuse excuse Bush and Cheney from their numerous prior and subsequent impeachable offenses. They don’t.

You also argue that terror acts shift attention what we do wrong to what they do wrong. That’s obviously true, but it also obviously has no bearing on (a) recognizing our own wrongdoings and (b) moving to solve the problem by impeaching the wrongdoers. To say “they did bad stuff too, so they’re to blame for the bad stuff we do” seems like grade school recess reasoning to me. It’s not worthy of the citizens of one of the oldest democratic republics in the world.

It was reading books by administration insiders like “Against All Enemies” by counterterrorism official Richard Clarke and “The Price of Loyalty” by Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill as told to Richard Suskind that convinced me that I could no longer give the Administration the benefit of the doubt, which I had been doing for a long time. Clarke and O’Neill heard and saw Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others make plans to invade Iraq before 9-11. The “Downing Street Memo” revelation that the administration was manipulating evidence to support its policy further supports this view. It was fear – fear of being fired, intimidated, ridiculed, of maybe being wrong – that prevented people like like George Tenet and Colin Powell from speaking out and stopping this before it was too late.

And it is too late for so many, but we can’t let fear stop us from speaking out and stating the obvious. With its disregard for and attempted dismantling of the Constitution, the phrase “The Emperor has no clothes” is depressingly appropriate.

Even before Bush was elected, there was a mood in the country of restlessness, longing for meaning and drama, and an opportunity to be ‘heroic.’ There was a nostalgia for the moral clarity of the Second World War, and a craze for Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation” and movies like “Saving Private Ryan.” When Bush was elected, the country was ripe for a war. He exploited that mood and the yearning to be part of something big and important, by rushing into a war against ‘evildoers’ that had no basis in fact. So what if we attacked an evildoer who had done nothing to us. His swarthy complexion and his beret and beard and those bushy eyebrows and that military uniform were enough for most people. Plus he had name recognition from the first Gulf War, which really helped with the marketing of the second war on Iraq.
The “neoconservatives” had this big idea to remake the middle east in the image of the U.S. and get rich in the process. They were so convinced of the beauty of their plan and of the way history would surely remember them as the guys who saved the world, just like Ronald Reagan ended the cold war, that they just couldn’t be bothered with the facts. The irony is that, for as much as they loved the idea of going to war, none of them except Rumsfeld had actually even served in the military and even Rumsfeld never got so much as a scratch during his service.

The Bush administration is not protecting us – they are doing a bad job at protecting our borders and have treated the intelligence community, who are supposed to be primarily responsible for tracking down terrorists, particularly badly. Have you ever noticed how many of the loudest voices for impeachment are from the military and intelligence communities?

I want to debate “No”!
215-563-2866 RichardKanegis@aol.com

I blame bin Laden, for some of what Bush is blamed for. He began apologizing for Abu Ghraib abuse in front of the King of Jordan. Then Republican leader Bill Frist was going to call for detention reform. Frist’s grim report of additional Abu Ghraib photos Congress privately viewed was cut of the air by a news bulletin concerning Nick Berg.

I and others were inspired watching Britain’s largest peace protest until a news bulletin of terror bombs in Turkey cut in. The same with bin Laden demanding Iraqis not to vote make claiming that the war had nothing to due with fighting terror seem awkward.

The Virginia Town Hall Impeachment debate had more depth and coverage by including both sides like in a trial, The Nation Magazine presented both sides

I’d like to present a Impeach Bush “No” manuscript and participate in upcoming town Hall debates

References

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070212/holtzman
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070212/levinson
http://www.peaceandaccountability.com/panel6_23_07.html

Minor clarification, in case anybody needs it: (I presume that) the city seal is decorative, and shouldn’t be taken to imply that this is an official City of Takoma Park press release.