Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Immediate Impeachment – The Only Way Out and Back!


by Ted Lang - July 25, 2007

The reality of Vice President Dick Cheney’s unprecedented, awesome and totally illegal power and authority over the people of America, the United States Congress, the Supreme Court, and all bureaus and agencies of American government, serves not only to invalidate totally the Constitution and the very founding of the United States, but proves correct as well the fears the Founders voiced when recognizing the threat of political parties. Identifying what is right or wrong with this country and its government no longer matters. Evaluating what is lawful and what is not are now devoid of both a system of recognition and a remedy. Attacking what is constitutional and what is not is now irrelevant; “it’s just a goddamned piece of paper.” Healing and corrective measures available to repair severely damaged and crippled government functions are overridden by concerns of resultant political fallout and posturing.

For whatever reason the Washington Post chose in allowing its staff writers, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, to launch their four-part series exposing Dick Cheney as America’s first functioning dictator, it opened the door to Bruce Fein’s call for Cheney’s impeachment in his editorial posted in Slate. Fein and the Post have legitimized and given substance to Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s House Resolution calling for just that action.

And in his July 9th article published in The New Yorker commenting on the Post’s effort and appropriately entitled “The Darksider,” Hendrik Hertzberg’s opinion of Cheney’s Svengali-like domination of our clueless frat boy president is marvelously articulated: “The story of the scowling, scheming, domineering, silently sinister Vice-President and the spoiled, petted prince who becomes his plaything is irresistible—set in a pristine White House, played against an ominous, unseen background of violence and catastrophe, like distant thunder, and packed with drama, palace intrigue, and black comedy.”

After the Post’s series and Bruce Fein’s call for Cheney’s impeachment, augmented by and made all the more sobering given Fein’s legal credentials and constitutional knowledge, Cheney struck back immediately and obviously ordered boy Bush to commute I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence, which will undoubtedly pave the way for a full pardon. Bush admitted that “an individual in his administration” did indeed deliberately expose undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, thereby facilitating retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, for his New York Times editorial letter exposing the fraudulent “intelligence” citing Iraq’s alleged Niger yellowcake activities. It is now painfully obvious that Cheney placed that line in Bush’s State of the Union Message recalling the Vice President’s unrelenting pressure on the CIA to provide precisely that very justification for the Iraqi invasion and war.

The arrogant and irreverent behavior of the Vice President towards all Americans and American government institutions was aptly described by Fein in his piece for Slate, wherein he also describes Cheney as having a “sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.” Cheney’s sinister, secretive, conniving and retributive mindset makes it now more readily apparent than ever that it was none other than he who played the principle role in exposing Plame, a Title 18 felony. Libby was successfully prosecuted and convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, while the real legal issue was that of the treason committed against the government of the United States as covered in 18 USC 794. Review of this section of the United States Code will reveal that the treason committed by Cheney’s office is greatly magnified when perpetrated during wartime.

Like Fein, Hertzberg summarizes the laundry list of Cheney offenses, but does so more succinctly while emphatically referencing the Post’s series: “But many of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive. Given the ontological authority that the Post shares only with the New York Times, it is now, so to speak, official: for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called ‘the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,’ has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable ‘war on terror.’”

Hertzberg deftly sums up into a critical mass the Cheney offenses: “More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of ‘cruel,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘degrading’ treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: ‘a no-brainer for me’), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.”

There is absolutely no other way of dealing with this American domestic and massive international crime wave than by the immediate and total impeachment of both Vice President Richard Cheney and President George Bush. For nothing that is political can escape the massive totalitarian ruination that Cheney-Bush has brought forth. As Hertzberg states, our military is being destroyed and will take years to rebuild. Our economy is being destroyed, and may deteriorate to where it cannot be re-established as the vibrant force it once was. It doesn’t take an economics rocket scientist to figure out that a nation that cannot provide its citizens with even basic consumer products is a nation that cannot successfully wage endless wars to enslave the citizens of other nations. America may still have the capability to make military materiel and weapons of mass destruction, but remember the logistics debacle that doomed Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia. Simple boots and winter jackets weren’t producible or deliverable to the shivering and starving Wehrmacht fighting the Russian winter and the Red Army.

And as to the sustaining natural resources America will require as a world-dominating global power, the natural resources we are attempting to steal in the Mid East will only be used to blow up things, and not to create food, clothing and housing for a nation whose economy is rapidly deteriorating in pursuit of power. We as a nation are slipping into third world status by investing all our wealth in things that go boom, blow up people and what they have built, while failing to appreciate the basic needs we as a people require to enjoy the Creator’s beneficence in having given us life. What is one to do with a billion dollar jet fighter, or an M1A1 tank, or a $50,000 artillery shell, when all that is really needed is to feed, clothe and shelter one’s family?

Cheney-Bush are destroying the two-party political system, the Constitution, our wealth, our ability to feed, clothe and house ourselves, our money system, our system of government and its laws, and virtually everything that is and was American. Only an extremely dedicated idiot and brain-damaged moron would utter: “Impeachment is off the table!” The fact is, it’s the ONLY thing left on the table! We will soon be out of all other options that have any semblance of beneficial value for our very survival! As has been pointed out by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Cheney-Bush needs another 9/11 and a war with Iran to distract US temporarily from our own demise!

In his article for Online Journal of July 20th and carried also on Prisonplanet.com entitled, “My wake-up call: Watch for another 9/11-WMD experience,” Roberts writes: “In the July 18 Los Angeles Times (‘Bush the Albatross’), Ronald Brownstein reminds us that Bush’s behavior is disastrous for his political party. Unpopular presidents ‘have consistently undercut their party in the next election.’ Brownstein reports that ‘88 percent of voters who disapproved of the retiring president’s job performance voted against his party’s nominee in past elections. . . . On average, 80 percent of voters who disapproved of a president’s performance have voted against his party’s candidates even in House races since 1986.’”

Roberts goes on: “Brownstein notes that with Bush’s dismal approval rating, this implies a total wipeout of the Republicans in 2008. A number of pundits have concluded that the reason the Democrats have not brought a halt to Bush’s follies is that they expect Bush’s unpopular policies to provide them with a landslide victory next year.” And this is precisely what I have alluded to concerning partisan politics substituting for doing what is right and what is so vitally needed immediately. So why must impeachment be initiated by Congress immediately?

Roberts explains: “There is a problem with this reasoning. It assumes that Cheney, Rove, and the Republicans are ignorant of these facts or are content for the Republican Party to be destroyed after Bush has his warmonger-police state fling.” Roberts goes on: “Isn’t it more likely that Cheney and Rove have in mind events that will, once again, rally the people behind President Bush and the Republican Party, that is fighting the ‘war on terror’ that the Democrats ‘want to lose’? Such events could take a number of forms. As even diehard Republican Patrick J. Buchanan observed on July 17, with three US aircraft carrier battle groups in congested waters off Iran, another Tonkin Gulf incident could easily be engineered to set us at war with Iran. If Bush’s intentions were merely to bomb a nuclear reactor, he would not need three carrier strike forces. Lately, the administration has switched to blaming Iran for the war in Iraq. The US Senate has already lined up behind the latest lie with a 97-0 vote to condemn Iran.”

What more damage could the Cheney-Bush crime machine do? The Senate is already totally behind the American dictatorship as concerns Iran; the same lies and deliberately cooked and fraudulent intelligence is now being propagandized and delivered to the American people by the mass media-government complex. Of course Roberts is right, and the so-called oversight that the Senate is demanding as their right and seemingly in the process of being satisfied by subpoenas to the Cheney dictatorship has been further delayed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy’s gracious grant of additional time so Cheney can set up the attack on US and/or Iran. The subpoenaed documents will be a total waste of time and be overtaken by the events of a new 9/11 and war with Iran.

It is clear that Democrats are only concerned with the next election. They aren’t the least bit disturbed that our Bill of Rights and habeas corpus, the latter a right English-speaking people have enjoyed since King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, has been suspended by Cheney. They aren’t concerned that Cheney has legalized and continues to expand authorized torture that had been abolished by the Geneva Conventions. They aren’t at all concerned that the whole world now sees Cheney and America in precisely the same light as they formerly saw Hitler and Nazi Germany. All they are focusing on is the meaningless and hollow victory of the 2008 presidential election which will decide on a new captain for our sinking Titanic ship of state.

Confirming Roberts’ assessment of a soon-to-be-executed 9/11-WMD experience is Mike Whitney’s July 18th piece written for Information Clearing House and also carried on Prisonplanet.com. Opining on New World Order globetrotter Henry Kissinger’s visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia, Whitney makes certain we all understand how the government-mass media complex has taken extra steps to ensure that Kissinger’s “diplomatic” mission to Moscow was kept a total secret, thereby confirming that Dictator Cheney’s was behind this secret mission of “diplomacy.”

Whitney in his “Kissinger’s Secret Meeting With Putin” writes, “Kissinger was accompanied on his junket by a delegation of high-powered political and corporate big-wigs including former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former Special Representative for Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., former Senator Sam Nunn and Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David O'Reilly. Wow. Now, there’s an impressive line up. The group was (presumably) sent to carry out official government business as discreetly as possible. The media obviously complied with White House requests and kept their mouths shut.”

It is a known fact that Russian President Putin vehemently opposes Cheney-Bush’s international maneuvering to isolate and then incorporate all nations into the bankers’ New World Order. Putin is a dedicated nationalist. He would never commit the kind of treason that Cheney is guilty of in debasing and destroying his own country for the “greater good” of an international communist New World Order. And Putin has notified Dictator Cheney that he is not exactly pleased with Cheney-Bush incursions via NATO in the Kosovo-Caspian Basin area that threaten Russia’s oil and natural gas pipeline interests.

Whitney writes: “The array of talent in Kissinger’s delegation suggests that the US and Russia are engaged in sensitive, high-level talks on issues ranging from nonproliferation and Missile Defense, to energy exploration and development, to the Iranian ‘enrichment’ program and partitioning of Serbia (Kosovo), to the falling dollar and the massive US current account deficit. The US and Russia are at loggerheads on many of these issues and relations between the two countries has steadily deteriorated.” These are yet more benefits of the one-man government of Dick Cheney.

Whitney goes on: “No one really knows what took place at the meetings, but judging by Kissinger’s parting remarks, things did not go smoothly. He said to one reporter, ‘We appreciate the time that President Putin gave us and the frank manner in which he explained his point of view.’ In diplomatic phraseology, ‘frank’ usually means that there were many areas of strong disagreement. Presumably, the main ‘bone of contention’ is Putin’s insistence on a ‘multi-polar’ world in which the sovereign rights of other nations are safeguarded under international law. Putin is ferociously nationalistic and he will not compromise Russia’s independence to be integrated into Kissinger and Co.’s wacky new world order.”

When I was in grammar school, we had to participate in numerous simulated attack/self-defense drills anticipating possible nuclear attacks by the former “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union. Now, a Russian President is doing more to ensure our national sovereignty than the President of the United States, the Vice president of the United States, and the do-nothing election-blind, spineless, gutless Congress. It seems the only one with a gut is the Department of Homeland Security Scheming Skull, Michael Chertoff, the former number two guy in our Department of Justice who quietly released the five high-fiving Mossad agents who helped place the explosives in the World Trade Towers. His “gut feel” is that another terrorist attack is imminent. I finally agree with something a member of the Cheney-Bush crime machine has said.

These are the reasons immediate impeachment proceedings are necessary. The Democrats, if they were to act immediately, could not only save their party, but the two-party system, their country and world peace all in this one necessary double impeachment effort. There is no need for any delay. The Cheney-Bush dictatorship has offered zillions of opportunities to call their bluff, and continues to do so in dodging subpoenas, ignoring official letters requesting information and clarification, and other door-opening crimes and effronteries. Time is rapidly running out for this golden opportunity for Democrats to save themselves and US. In the most recent poll, 45 percent of Americans want Bush impeached, but a whopping 54 percent want Cheney impeached. That is unprecedented!

The government-mass media complex knows of this poll, and yet hasn’t even acknowledged its importance or uniqueness. This is the first time in the history of this former republic that such a massive hatred for a vice president has ever been expressed by Americans! How can a vice president generate so much hatred amongst the general populace? And even more importantly for consideration, how is it that hatred for the vice president exceeds that of the president? Isn’t it clear that the American people know who’s running the show? Isn’t it clear that Cheney-Bush must act soon and bring about yet another 9/11-WMD experience to save themselves? Isn’t it clear that unless Democrats act immediately, everything in American politics will be forever lost?

Impeachment may indeed soon be permanently off the table, but for the most horrific of reasons, reasons which will defy all manner of correction or remedy.

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