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Why Bush Hasn’t Been Impeached
Congress, The Media and Most of The American People Have Yet To
Turn Decisively Against Bush because To Do So Would Be To Turn
Against Some Part of Themselves.
By Gary Kamiya
05/22/07 "Salon"
--- - The Bush presidency is a lot of things. It’s a
secretive cabal, a cavalcade of incompetence, a blood-stained
Church Militant, a bad rerun of “The Godfather” in which scary
men in suits
pay ominous visits to hospital rooms. But seen from the
point of view of the American people, what it increasingly
resembles is a bad marriage. America finds itself married to a
guy who has turned out to be a complete dud. Divorce — which in
our nonparliamentary system means
impeachment — is the logical solution. But even though Bush
cheated on us, lied, besmirched our family’s name and spent all
our money, we the people, not to mention our elected
representatives and the media, seem content to stick it out to
the bitter end.
There is a strange disconnect in the way Americans think
about
George W. Bush. He is extraordinarily unpopular. His
approval
ratings, which have been abysmal for about 18 months, have
now sunk to their lowest ever, making him the most unpopular
president in a generation. His 28 percent approval rating in a
May 5 Newsweek poll ties that of Jimmy Carter in 1979 after
the failed Iran rescue mission. Bush’s unpopularity has
emboldened congressional Democrats, who now have no qualms about
attacking him directly and flatly asserting that his
Iraq
war is lost.
Some of them have also been willing to invoke the I-word —
joining a large number of Americans. Several polls taken in the
last two years have shown that large numbers of Americans
support impeachment. An
Angus Reid poll taken in May 2007 found that a remarkable 39
percent of Americans favored the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.
An
earlier poll, framed in a more hypothetical way, found that
50 percent of Americans supported impeaching Bush if he lied
about the war — which most of that 50 percent presumably now
believe he did. Vermont has gone on record in calling for his
impeachment, and a number of cities, including Detroit and San
Francisco, have passed impeachment resolutions. Reps. John
Murtha and John Conyers and a few other politicians have floated
the idea. And there is a significant grassroots
movement to impeach Bush, spearheaded by organizations like
After Downing
Street. Even some Republicans, outraged by Bush’s failure to
uphold right-wing positions (his immigration policy, in
particular), have begun muttering about impeachment.
Bush’s unpopularity is mostly a result of Iraq, which most
Americans now believe was a colossal mistake and a war we cannot
win. But his problems go far beyond Iraq. His administration has
been dogged by one massive scandal after the other, from the
Katrina debacle, to Bush’s approval of
illegal wiretapping and torture, to his unparalleled use of
“signing statements” to disobey laws he disagrees with, to
the outrageous Gonzales and
U.S. attorneys affair.
In response to these outrages, a growing literature of
pro-impeachment books, from “The Case for Impeachment” by Dave
Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky to “U.S. v. Bush” by Elizabeth
Holtzman to “The Impeachment of George W. Bush” by Elizabeth de
la Vega, argue not only that Bush’s misdeeds are clearly
impeachable, but also that a failure to impeach a rogue
president bent on amassing unprecedented power will threaten our
most cherished traditions. As Lindorff and Olshansky conclude,
“If we fail to stand up for the Constitution now, it may be only
a piece of paper by the end of President Bush’s second term.
Then it will be time to be afraid.”
Yet the public’s dislike of Bush has not translated into any
real move to get rid of him. The impeach-Bush movement has not
really taken off yet, and barring some unforeseen dramatic
development, it seems unlikely that it will. Even if there were
a mass popular movement to impeach Bush, it’s far from clear
that Congress, which alone has the power to initiate impeachment
proceedings, would do anything. The Democratic congressional
majority has been at best lukewarm to the idea. In any case,
their constituents have not demanded it forcefully or in such
numbers that politicians feel they must respond. Democrats, and
for that matter Americans of all political persuasions, seem
content to watch Bush slowly bleed to death.
Why? Why was Clinton, who was never as unpopular as Bush,
impeached for lying about sex, while Bush faces no sanction for
the far more serious offense of lying about war?
The main reason is obvious: The Democrats think it’s bad
politics. Bush is dying politically and taking the GOP down with
him, and impeachment is risky. It could, so the cautious Beltway
wisdom has it, provoke a backlash, especially while the war is
still going on. Why should the Democrats gamble on hitting the
political jackpot when they’re likely to walk away from the
table big winners anyway?
These realpolitik considerations might be sufficient by
themselves to prevent Congress from impeaching Bush. Impeachment
is a strange phenomenon — a murky combination of the legal, the
political and the emotional. The Constitution offers no explicit
guidance on what constitutes an impeachable offense, stating
only that a president can be impeached and, if convicted,
removed from office for treason, bribery “or other high crimes
and misdemeanors.” As a result, politicians contemplating
impeachment take their cues from a number of disparate factors —
not just a president’s misdeeds, but a cost-benefit analysis.
And Congress tends to follow the cost-benefit analysis. If
you’re going to kill the king, you have to make sure you succeed
— and there’s just enough doubt in Democrats’ minds to keep
their swords sheathed.
But there’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment
movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush
but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to
something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force
behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an
angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the
media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront
directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush
would force us to directly confront our national core of violent
self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and
reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.
The truth is that Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors, far
from being too small, are too great. What has saved
Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life
and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by
9/11.
Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive
bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a
long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day.
Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to
turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn
against some part of themselves. This doesn’t mean we support
Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we’re too
confused — not least by our own complicity — to work up the
cold, final anger we’d need to go through impeachment. We
haven’t done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our
abusive spouse. We need therapy — not to save this disastrous
marriage, but to end it.
At first glance it seems odd that Bush’s fraudulent case for
war has saved him. War is the most serious action a nation can
undertake, and lying to Congress and the American people about
the need for war is arguably the most serious offense a public
official can commit, short of treason. But the unique gravity of
war surrounds it with a kind of patriotic force field. There is
an ancient human deference to The Strong Man Who Will Defend Us,
an atavistic surrender to authority that goes back through
Milosevic, to Henry V, to Beowulf and the ring givers, and
ultimately to Cro-Magnon tribesmen huddled around the campfire
at the feet of the biggest, strongest warrior. Even when it is
unequivocally shown that a leader lied about war, as is the case
with Bush, he or she is still protected by this aura. Going to
war is the best thing a rogue president can do. It’s like taking
refuge in a church: No one can come and get you there. There’s a
reason Bush kept repeating, “I’m a war president. I’m a war
president.” It worked, literally, like a charm.
And many of the American people shared Bush’s views. A large
percentage of the American people, and their elected
representatives, accepted Bush’s unlimited authority to do
whatever he wanted in the name of “national security.” And they
reaffirmed this acceptance when, long after his fraudulent case
for war had been exposed as such, they reelected him. Lindorff
and Olshansky quote former Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker, who
justifies his opposition to impeachment by saying, “Bush
obviously lied to the country and the Congress about the war,
but we have a system of elections in this country. Everyone knew
about the lying before the 2004 elections, and they didn’t do
anything about it … Bush got elected. The horse is out of the
barn now.”
To be sure, the war card works better under some
circumstances than others. It is arguable that if there had been
no 9/11, Bush’s fraudulent case for war really would have
resulted in his impeachment — though this is far from certain.
But 9/11 did happen, and as a result, large numbers of Americans
did not just give Bush carte blanche but actively wanted him to
attack someone. They were driven not by policy concerns but by
primordial retribution, reflexive and self-righteous rage. And
it wasn’t just the masses who were calling for the United States
to reach out and smash someone. Pundits like Henry Kissinger and
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also called for America
to attack the Arab world. Kissinger, according to Bob Woodward’s
“State of Denial,” said that “we need to humiliate them”;
Friedman said we needed to “go right into the heart of the
Arab world and smash something.” As Friedman’s statement
indicates, who we smashed was
basically unimportant. Friedman and Kissinger argued that
attacking the Arab would serve as a deterrent, but that was a
detail. For many Americans, who Bush attacked or the reasons he
gave, didn’t matter — what mattered was that we were fighting
back.
To this day, the primitive feeling that in response to 9/11
we had to hit hard at “the enemy,” whoever that might be, is a
sacred cow. America’s deference to the
shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach is profound: It’s
the gut belief that still drives Bush supporters and leads them
to regard war critics as contemptible appeasers. This is why
Bush endlessly repeats his mantra “We’re staying on the attack.”
The unpleasant truth is that Bush did what a lot of Americans
wanted him to. And when it became clear after the fact that Bush
had lied about the threat posed by
Saddam Hussein, it made no sense for those Americans to turn
on him. Truth was never their major concern anyway — revenge
was. And if we took revenge on the wrong person, well, better a
misplaced revenge than none at all.
For those who did not completely succumb to the desire for
primitive vengeance but were convinced by Bush’s fraudulent
arguments about the threat posed by Saddam, the situation is
more ambiguous. Now that his arguments have been exposed and the
war has become a disaster, they feel let down, even betrayed —
but not enough to motivate them to call for Bush’s impeachment.
This is because they cannot exorcise the still-mainstream view
that Bush’s lies were justifiable and even noble, Straussian
untruths told in support of what Bush believed to be a good
cause. According to this line of thinking, since Bush and his
neocon brain trust really believed that Saddam Hussein was a
dangerous tyrant, the lies they told in whipping up support for
war were, while reprehensible, somewhat forgivable.
In Elizabeth de la Vega’s book on impeachment, framed as a
fictitious indictment of Bush for conspiring to defraud the
United States, she argues that from a legal standpoint it
doesn’t matter that Bush may have believed his lies were in the
service of a higher good — he’s still guilty of fraud. In a
brilliant stroke, de la Vega compares the Bush administration’s
lies to those told by Enron executives — who were, of course,
rightfully convicted.
The problem is that the American people are not judging Bush
by the standards of law. The Bush years have further weakened
America’s once-proud status as a nation of laws, not of men. The
law, for Bush, is like language for Humpty Dumpty: it means just
what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. This attitude
has become disturbingly widespread — which may explain why
Bush’s illegal wiretapping, his approval of torture, and his
administration’s partisan purge of U.S. district attorneys have
not resulted in wider outrage.
This society-wide diminution of respect for law has helped
Bush immeasurably. It is not just the law that America has
turned away from, but what the law stands for — accountability,
memory, history and logic itself. That anonymous senior Bush
advisor who spoke with surreal condescension of “the
reality-based community” may have summed up our cultural moment
more acutely than anyone else in years. A society without
memory, driven by ephemeral emotions, which demands no
consistency from its leaders but only gusty patriotism, is a
society that is not about to engage in the painful
self-examination that impeachment would mean.
A corollary to the decline of logic is our acceptance of the
universality of spin. It no longer seems odd to us that a
president should lie to get what he wants. In this regard, Bush,
the most sanctimonious of presidents, must be seen as having
degraded traditional American values more than the most
relativist, Nietzsche-spouting postmodernist.
All of these factors — the sacrosanct status of war, the
public’s complicity in an irrational demonstration of raw power,
the loss of respect for law, logic and memory, the bland
acceptance of spin and lies, the public unconcern about the
fraudulence of Bush’s actions — have created a situation in
which it is widely accepted that Bush’s lies about Iraq were not
impeachable or even that scandalous, but merely a matter of
policy. Just as conservatives lamely charged that the
Scooter Libby case represented the “criminalization of
politics,” so the conventional wisdom holds that distorting
evidence to justify a war may be slightly reprehensible, but is
not worth making much of a fuss about, and is certainly not
impeachable.
The establishment media, which has tended to treat
impeachment talk as if it were the unseemly rantings of
half-crazed hordes, has clearly bought this paradigm. In this
view, those who want to impeach Bush, or who are simply
vehemently critical of him, are partisan extremists outside the
mainstream of American discourse. This decorous approach has
begun to weaken. A recent U.S. News and World Report cover read,
“Bush’s last stand: He’s plagued by a hostile Congress, sinking
polls, and an unending war. Is he resolute or delusional?” When
centrist newsweeklies begin using words drawn from psychiatric
manuals, it may be time for Karl Rove to get worried. But it
takes time to turn the Titanic. The years of deference to the
War Leader cannot be overcome that quickly.
For all these reasons, impeachment, however justified or
salutary it would be — and I believe it would be both justified
and salutary — remains a long shot. Bush will probably escape
the fate of Andrew Johnson and the disgrace of Richard Nixon.
But he’s not home free yet. The culture of spin is also the
culture of spectacle, and a sudden, theatrical event — a lurid
accusation made by a former official, a colorful revelation of a
very specific and memorable Bush lie — could start the scandal
machine going full speed. Even the war card cannot be played
indefinitely. If Bush were to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and
the full dimensions of America’s defeat were to become apparent,
all of his war-president potency would backfire and he would be
in much greater danger of being impeached. Congress and the
media both gain courage as the polls sink, and if Bush’s numbers
continue to hit historic lows, they will turn on him with
increasing savagery. If everything happens just so, the downfall
of the House of Bush could be shocking in its swiftness.
© 2007 Salon.com
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