[Rhodes22-list] 'Political' Left wing back channel communication! 'Political' Big Al delete...

[Tootle]

Folks,

A member of this forum sent me the following post back channel so the rest
of you would not read the email.  This did not come from Cindy Spitzer a
writer on the offending left wing newspaper alleged to have printed this
snivel:

Why I Believe Bush Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.

By George McGovern
Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have
belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is
to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach
President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought
that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of
personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The
political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship,
especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the
part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan
impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They
have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national
and international law. They have lied to the American people time after
time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved
country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are
truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

>From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the
product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially
challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout
the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has
been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible
venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number
mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000
Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The
financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is
expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed
from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9
trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that
the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in
violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and
property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse
of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the
Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon
administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger
than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the
1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a
Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our
national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing,
immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived
Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had
nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent
threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to
believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant
falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's
observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is
just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of
fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the
invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the
illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same
fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the
press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world --
more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off
the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries
without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August
that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to
the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that
brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an
unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and
experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark
the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of
their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have
increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United
States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President
Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August
1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world,
including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab
League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese
paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly
occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the
Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and
economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no
capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military
occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil
strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state,
James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft,
all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral
responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the
Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty
condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly
bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any
impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the
collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural
disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act.
Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to
deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land.
It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of
us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support
the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I
believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the
Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the
most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of
hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in
Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override
our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as
I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that
he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits
high crimes and misdemeanors."

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the
opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and
will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and
Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the
difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on
long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed
that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we
faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great
nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we
have survived and recovered.


© 2008 The Washington Post Company


Fowarded to demonstrate the anti Americanism of the left continues... 

Ed K
Greenville, SC, USA
"Political liberty is incompatible with economic subjection." Max Eastman

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