Alexander Cockburn asks a very good question. Even if the Democrats take back Congress in 2006, do they have even an ounce of what it takes to defend the Constitution? Do the Democrats have the courage to impeach Bush?
All the evidence suggests that they do not.
. . . Now Bush is saying that the job will be done when Iraqis enjoy the democratic freedoms guaranteed Americans. We should say, They do! Bought news stories, secret surveillance of phone calls, emails and faxes, arrest without warrant, disappearances, torture You've brought our democracies into sync. Call it a day, bring the troops home, and then we can start impeaching you.
But who would do the impeaching? The Democrats have lost as much credibility as the President and the Republicans. Ever since the New York Times loitered a year late into print with its disclosure about the NSA spying program (only the latest in a sequence of unconstitutional infamies by that Agency stretching back for decades, mostly against domestic political protesters) I've seen it argued that if the Times had gone with the story last year, Kerry might be president.
But if the Democrats had cared about the Constitution they could have broken the story themselves last year. Democratic congressional leaders knew, because the whistleblowers from the NSA desperately tried to alert them, only to get the cold shoulder. Kerry's prime advisers Richard Clark and Rand Beers on such matters knew, because they'd previously been Bush's top functionaries in the war on terror.
We're heading into a year when the Democrats could be making hay, by actually doing the right thing. In 2005 is a pointer, they never will. The latest evidence is that Rahm Emanuel, in charge of selecting Democratic Congressional candidates for 2006, is choosing millionaires and fence-straddlers on the war. He shunned Christine Cegelis, who nearly beat sixteen-termer Henry Hyde in 2004, and whom Illinois polls show to be a popular contender to succeed Hyde. But Cegelis has the disadvantage in Emanuel's eyes of not being very rich and of agreeing with John Murtha on immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Emanuel picks Tammy Duckworth, who embodies the cynicism of the "Democratic strategists", being a double-amputee woman Iraq veteran who is not from the district, has a hot-air position on the war and is thought to espouse a "pro-business/centrist platform".
For years Democrats have been dreaming of having a brawny, non-nonsense type, preferably draped in medals, lead them into political battle. They picked a clunker last year, in the form of John Kerry, who had a glass jaw, six houses, a silly billionaire wife and an infinite capacity for talking out of both sides of his mouth. Along comes Murtha, who was actually a Marine drill sergeant at Parris Island, who has 100 per cent credibility on military matters, who showed how to talk about the war, how to say It's quitting time. And they fled him like a poisoned thing. They still do.
[...]
So that's it for Christmas, 2005: No credibility for the President, or for the Democrats, or for the New York Times, which took a year to figure out whether the Constitution is worth fighting for.
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Bush Impeach Bush 2006 Democrats Snoopgate New York Times King George Cockburn
