Impeach Bush !!!!

March 25th, 2007 5:59 pm
Hagel: Some See Impeachment As Option

GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel: Some Lawmakers See Impeachment As Option if Bush Continues Iraq Strategy

By Hope Yen / Associated Press

WASHINGTON - With his go-it-alone approach on Iraq, President Bush is flouting Congress and the public, so angering lawmakers that some consider impeachment an option over his war policy, a senator from Bush's own party said Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Senate's No. 2 Republican leader harshly criticized House Democrats for setting an "artificial date" for withdrawing troops from Iraq and said he believes Republicans have enough votes to prevent passage of a similar bill in the Senate.

"We need to put that kind of decision in the hands of our commanders who are there on the ground with the men and women," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. "For Congress to impose an artificial date of any kind is totally irresponsible."

GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent critic of the war, stopped short of calling for Bush's impeachment. But he made clear that some lawmakers viewed that as an option should Bush choose to push ahead despite public sentiment against the war.

"Any president who says, I don't care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed if a president really believes that, then there are what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that," said Hagel, who is considering a 2008 presidential run.

The Senate planned to begin debate Monday on a war spending bill that would set a nonbinding goal of March 31, 2008, for the removal of combat troops.

That comes after the House narrowly passed a bill Friday that would pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year but would require that combat troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 or earlier if the Iraqi government did not meet certain requirements.

On Sunday, Hagel said he was bothered by Bush's apparent disregard of congressional sentiment on Iraq, such as his decision to send additional troops. He said lawmakers now stood ready to stand up to the president when necessary.

In the April edition of Esquire magazine, Hagel described Bush as someone who doesn't believe he's accountable to anyone. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends on how this goes," Hagel told the magazine.

In his weekly address Saturday, Bush accused Democrats of partisanship in the House vote and said it would cut the number of troops below a level that U.S. military commanders say they need. Vice President Dick Cheney also accused Democrats of undermining U.S. troops in Iraq and of sending a message to terrorists that America will retreat in the face danger.

"We have clearly a situation where the president has lost the confidence of the American people in his war effort," Hagel said. "It is now time, going into the fifth year of that effort, for the Congress to step forward and be part of setting some boundaries and some conditions as to our involvement."

"This is not a monarchy," he added, referring to the possibility that some lawmakers may seek impeachment. "There are ways to deal with it. And I would hope the president understands that."

Lott said setting withdrawal dates is a futile and potentially dangerous exercise because Bush has made clear he will veto any such legislation.

"There are members in the Senate in both parties that are not comfortable with how things have gone in Iraq," Lott said. "But they understand that artificial timetables, even as goals, are a problem. ...We will try to take out the arbitrary dates."

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the Senate bill seeks to heed the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group by setting a goal of withdrawing some troops while leaving others behind to train the Iraqi army for border patrol and other missions.

"That, combined with a very aggressive, diplomatic effort in the region is what we're going to need to have," he said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she believed that setting a timetable was appropriate but declined to predict whether it would garner enough Senate votes to pass.

"People of this country have spoken overwhelmingly. It's been constant now," Feinstein said. "They want us out. It is time for the Senate to weigh in. I hope we will have the votes."

Hagel spoke on ABC's "This Week," Feinstein and Lott appeared on "Fox News Sunday," and Nelson was on CNN's "Late Edition

IMPEACH BUSH !!!I

IMPEACH BUSH !!!!!!!


IMPEACH BUSH !!!!


IMPEACH BUSH !!!


NOW !!!!!

'Betrayals' ...by Cindy Sheehan

Monday, March 12th, 2007
'Betrayals' ...by Cindy Sheehan

In the past week, my travels have taken me to 15 different cities in New England holding impeachment teach-ins.

Admittedly, we were speaking to converted, mostly singing, Impeachment Choir members, but still, the outrage against the crimes of the BushCo is palpable and profound.

I can also feel the frustration mounting against the Democratic Party who did nothing to check the outright criminals squatting in the White House and Blair House for the first six years of unmitigated disaster because they were not “in power.” Now that the Dems are “in power” they are still doing nothing to rein in the reign of King George the Terrible. What is Congress’ excuse now? It is unfathomable that they have not already courageously acted against BushCo! Instead of inviting George to speak at the recent Dem retreat, they should have had him handcuffed!

As Chalmers Johnson says in his fabulous book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic:

When it comes to the deliberate dismantling of the Constitution, however, the events that followed the Supreme Court’s intervention in the election of 2000 that named George W. Bush the forty-third president have proved unprecedented...If the United States has neither the means nor the will to overcome this crisis, then we have entered the last days of the Republic.

Our Republic has the means (Articles of Impeachment) to overcome the shocking crisis we have found ourselves in, but where is the will? I was thrilled with my fellow Americans when we went out to vote in record numbers against George Bush and his failed war and disastrous foreign and domestic policies. I was not optimistic though that a change in Congressional power would make a difference in the war. I knew that the struggle for peace must continue full force with the Dems as we had been doing with a Republican controlled government for years. I found that criticizing Democrats for behaving the same way as Republicans is not popular in some “liberal” circles, but the occupation of Iraq is not popular in most circles and the Democrats are not doing anything constructive to obstruct the Bush Regime.

One of my idols, Congressman John Conyers was on Amy Goodman shortly after the January 27th rally and march in DC where he proclaimed that we could “fire” George Bush. Amy asked him how we could do that short of impeachment and Mr. Conyers said that impeachment was a “luxury.” Many people feel that for peace and justice to once again come to our world that impeachment is about as much of a luxury to humanity as oxygen is. I found it ironic, also, that at the end of a week where Congress spent the entire time debating a NON-binding, meaningless resolution against the occupation; Mr. Conyers called impeachment a “waste of time.”

George Bush is well into the seventh and penultimate year of his mind-boggling and injurious presidency and he only becomes more defiant and obstinate about holding onto an occupation that is destroying at least two countries and leading this country down a path to becoming a rogue state with vast and appalling nuclear capabilities. However, a few weeks ago, he finally said something that I agreed with. If Congress really feels strongly about ending the occupation, they would not send him meaningless NON-binding resolutions, but they would vote “nay” on the next supplemental one hundred billions of more dollars that he is asking for to wage his war of terror. I totally agree, but he and Congress are immorally using the “support the troops” anti-troop excuse to give a psychopathic killer more money to kill more of our troops and more innocent Iraqi babies.

Our troops have never been supported in the field in Iraq and I have news for people who are breaking the back of our military to continue to line the pockets of the war machine: OUR TROOPS DON’T NEED SUPPORT IN THE FIELD, IF THEY ARE BROUGHT HOME. It is as simple and pure as that. Use the money that has already been appropriated to fund a safe and speedy withdrawal and use future monies to fully fund the VA system to take care of our veterans and to pay reparations to the peoples of Iraq.

The Iraqi people, our troops, the darling baby girl sitting in front of me and the two toddler boys behind me who have been kicking the back of my seat for about two hours now on this plane and the rest of the children of the world, do not have the “luxury” of waiting for peace and accountability. Roughly one Iraqi has been killed for every ten minutes of the occupation; one American soldier dies every ten hours and ten billion dollars an hour have been stolen from our families and communities by the new robber barons of the 21st century.

BushCo has continually and consistently betrayed its position as officers of the public trust and Congress is following suit by allowing it to get away with its transgressions.

The planet cannot afford two more years of the Bush regime. We can only be betrayed if we allow the treachery to continue.

We voted for change on November 7th. Now let’s make sure our votes count.

Call Congressman Conyers.

Call Speaker Pelosi.

Call your Congressional Representative.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Bush's war of terror on 04/04/04.

She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and The Camp Casey Peace Institute.

[Click here to call for impeachment]

http://staging.michaelmoore.com/_images/splash/masterofpuppets.jpg

A Judgment on Cheney Is Still to Come

March 7th, 2007 2:42 am
A Judgment on Cheney Is Still to Come

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg / New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 6 — In legal terms, the jury has spoken in the Libby case. In political terms, Dick Cheney is still awaiting a judgment.

For weeks, Washington watched, mesmerized, as the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. cast Vice President Cheney, his former boss, in the role of puppeteer, pulling the strings in a covert public relations campaign to defend the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq and discredit a critic.

“There is a cloud over the vice president,” the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.

Mr. Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, fighting back against suggestions that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the news media and backing Mr. Libby to the end.

With Tuesday’s verdict on Mr. Libby — guilty on four of five counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice — Mr. Cheney’s critics, and even some of his supporters, said the vice president had been diminished.

“The trial has been death by 1,000 cuts for Cheney,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “It’s hurt him inside the administration. It’s hurt him with the Congress, and it’s hurt his stature around the world because it has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate.”

The legal question in the case was whether Mr. Libby lied to investigators and prosecutors looking into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times accusing the White House of distorting pre-war intelligence. Mr. Cheney scrawled notes on a copy of the article, asking “did his wife send him on a junket?”

Now, Mr. Cheney faces a civil suit from Mr. Wilson.

The political question was whether Mr. Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff, was “the fall guy” for his boss, in the words of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Though the defense introduced a note from Mr. Cheney worrying that Mr. Libby was being sacrificed to protect other White House officials, some say the vice president bears responsibility for the fate of his former aide, known as Scooter.

“It was clear that what Scooter was doing in the Wilson case was at Dick’s behest,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, a former Reagan administration official who has been close with both men but has broken with Mr. Cheney over the Iraq war. “That was clear. It was clear from Dick’s notes on the Op-Ed piece that he wanted to go get Wilson. And Scooter’s not that type. He’s not a vindictive person.”

Mr. Cheney is arguably the most powerful vice president in American history, and perhaps the most secretive. The trial painted a portrait of a man immersed in the kind of political pushback that is common to all White Houses, yet often presumed to be the province of low-level political operatives, not the vice president of the United States.

Prosecutors played a tape of Mr. Libby testifying to a grand jury that Mr. Cheney had asked Mr. Bush to declassify an intelligence report selectively so he, Mr. Libby, could leak it to sympathetic reporters. Mr. Cheney’s hand-written scribbles were introduced into evidence at the trial, including the one that hinted Mr. Cheney believed that his own staffer, Mr. Libby, was being sacrificed.

“’Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meat-grinder because of the incompetence of others,” the note read.

Mr. Cheney’s defenders insisted the vice president was not out to smear Mr. Wilson or even clear his own name, but simply to defend a policy he fiercely believed in.

“There wasn’t some Cheney strategy or Wilson strategy,” said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney’s former political director. “There was only one strategy: to convey the nature of the intelligence and the nature of the threat.”

Ms. Matalin said Mr. Cheney remained as influential as ever where it counts — with Mr. Bush.

Still, liberal critics of the administration had a field day with the trial. They are hoping the Democrats who now control Congress will use the case to investigate Mr. Cheney’s role further. Mr. Schumer, who was among the first to call for a special prosecutor in the case, suggested in an interview that they might.

“I think there is a view in the public that Libby was the fall guy,” Mr. Schumer said, “and I do think we will look at how the case shows the misuse of intelligence both before and after the war in Iraq.”

Such issues are already of intense interest to scholars, who say the Libby case will invariably shape Mr. Cheney’s legacy.

Historians typically pay scant attention to vice presidents, unless they become president. Mr. Cheney, though, is an exception. The historian Robert Dallek, who has written about presidents including Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, predicts scholars will “be racing for vice-presidential records in a way that we’ve never seen before” to answer questions raised by the Libby trial.

“It will deepen the impressions of someone who was a tremendous manipulator and was very defensive about mistakes,” Mr. Dallek said, “and I think it will greatly deepen the impression of a political operator who knew the ins and outs of Washington hardball politics. He’s going to be, I think, the most interesting vice president in history to study.”

On a personal level, friends of the vice president say the trial has been deeply painful for him. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were all but inseparable — Ms. Matalin has called the former aide “Cheney’s Cheney” — and often started their days by riding to work together. Mr. Libby accompanied the vice president almost everywhere he went, and Mr. Cheney made clear his high professional and personal regard for his aide, even playing host to a book party for him in 2002 at his official residence. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican former senator from Mr. Cheney’s home state, Wyoming, said he saw Mr. Cheney over Christmas and asked how he was doing. He took the answer as a kind of oblique reference to the Libby case.

“He said, ‘I’m fine, I’m O.K., I have people I trust around me — it’s the same old stuff, Al,’ ” Mr. Simpson recalled.

Another friend of Mr. Cheney’s, Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman, said the verdict had “got to be heartbreaking for the vice president.” But Mr. Weber said he wished Mr. Cheney would explain himself.

“I don’t think he has to do a long apologia,” Mr. Weber said, “but I think he should say something, just to pierce the boil a little bit.”

Instead, Mr. Cheney maintained his silence Tuesday. As the verdicts were being read, he went to the Capitol for the Republicans’ regular weekly policy luncheon. Later, he issued a two-paragraph statement saying only that he was disappointed with the verdict, “saddened for Scooter and his family” and would have no further comment while an appeal is pending.

With a career in politics that goes back to the Nixon White House, Mr. Cheney is no stranger to Washington scandal and how to weather it. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he went hunting with the vice president late last year and did not sense that the trial was bothering him.