November 22, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

REMEMBERING JFK

It was this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was shot down in the streets of Dallas, Texas, while riding in an open limousine on his way to deliver a campaign speech. American history took a decisive and ominous turn on that day.

JFK dealt with virulent right-wingers in his time. That morning a full page newspaper ad in Texas called JFK a traitor because he wanted to take a new direction with the Soviet Union and because he didn't overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. The right wing probably didn't like movements toward improving life for ordinary Americans in programs that were to pass in the Johnson administration such as Medicare and civil rights legislation.

We saw several assassinations of progressive leaders in the 60's, including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Violence and repression are the tools of the right wing. But throughout human history the repressive elements have been defeated. We have a lot of work to do, but work we must.

LET'S START WITH IMPEACHMENT

It's too bad that life can't work the way a computer works. You have a "system restore" option on a computer to take it back to settings from an earlier time. The United States needs a system restore now, but we can't undo so much damage that the Bush administration has inflicted on the country and on the world. We can't bring back the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't undo the massive physical and psychological damage to the troops wounded and killed in Bush's wars. But we can establish this as a dividing line to show that we've learned from this experience and will not repeat what we've witnessed during the Bush years. I believe a first, actually a modest step, is to impeach Bush and Cheney. It will show that we, along with the world, abhor what has happened. It is not acceptable. This column by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been a criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing the classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

That is the logical conclusion one would draw from a new statement by then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan when it is put into a mosaic with previously known evidence.

McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking officials who caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s employment as an undercover intelligence officer.

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” McClellan said. “So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”