We have all heard the arguments on impeachment, pro and con. We have all heard about whether or not we “have the votes.” Whether or not this will ruin our chances in 2008 for a Democratic victory. We have all discussed every possible permutation, and we have no consensus. Ok. I accept that. My decision is to support anyone who is for impeachment, and that includes Kucinich, who I think is doing a great job getting this issue in the spotlight.
This diary isn’t just about impeachment. It’s also about what can happen if we don’t impeach this crew, and asks the question of what we will do if any of these things come to pass. As much as I’m pro-impeachment, if it doesn’t happen I’m not going to lay down and die — I want to know the consequences and take action.
One of the consequences has to do with the 2008 Presidential election.
None of this may come to pass, and I hope that is the case. I am claiming no precognitive abilities here.
But I do think Naomi Wolf has some interesting things to say as far as these consequences, in her post over at Firedoglake, A “Presidential Coup,” The Continuity of Government, And Blackwater Watching Midtown Manhattan
I have argued that in the closing stages of a `fascist shift’, events cascade. I am hearing about them, even across the globe. Here in Australia I hear from the nation’s best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer’, she told TSA agents. `Ma’am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,’ they replied. `You have not entered the United States.’
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Increasingly, reputable figures are starting to talk about `a coup.’ Jim Hightower notes in an important essay, “Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?,” that a coup is defined in the dictionary as a sudden forced change in the form of government. (He also spells out the basis for a rigorously modeled impeachment and criminal prosecution.) Daniel Ellsberg’s much-emailed speech on recent events notes that, in his view, a `coup’ has already taken place. Ron Rosenbaum speculates in an essay on Slate about the reasons the Bush administration is withholding even from members of Congress its plans for Continuity of Government in an emergency – noting that those worrying about a coup are no longer so marginal. Frank Rich notes the parallels between ourselves and the Good Germans. And Congress belatedly realizes as if waking from a drugged sleep that it might not be okay for the Attorney General to say the President need not obey the law. Congress may realize why Mukasey CAN’T say that `waterboarding is torture’ – the minute he does so he has laid the grounds for Bush, Cheney and any number of CIA and Blackwater interrogators to be tried and convicted for war crimes. They are so keenly aware that what they have been doing is criminal that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 have been drafted specifically to protect them and the torturers and murderers they have directed from criminal prosecution. That is why insisting that Mukasey say that waterboarding is torture is, in spite of the alarming apparent defection of Feinstein and Schumer, an important tactic and even the perfect opening for the impeachment bid that Kucinich is bringing on November 6th to be followed by Congressional investigations into possible criminality.
