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FOX News agrees with Democratic party-Democrats Must End Talk of Bush Impeachment

by Open-Publishing - Friday 26 May 2006
4 comments

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Now that everyone recognizes what I first said last September - that Democrats have a real chance of taking back control of the U.S. House of Representatives this Fall - it’s time for Democrats to start acting like winners.

Step one would be for the Democratic leadership to definitively put to rest any loose talk of impeaching President Bush. They should say in one and two syllable words that impeachment will not happen once they are in the majority and thus take away a potential rallying cry for the beleaguered Republicans.

I know there are people on the left who would like to see Bush impeached but they do harm to the Democratic Party by raising this as a possibility and Democratic leaders should shut them up once and for all.

This is not very complicated. We don’t impeach presidents for incompetence...only for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Bush administration is clearly one of the most incompetent in recent times— if not in our entire 200 year plus history. If we were a parliamentary system, Congress would have long ago passed a vote of “no confidence” and there would be new national elections.

We are, however, not a parliamentary system so we are stuck with Bush for two and half more years.

However, impeachment is not the answer. It is a remedy that should be used vary sparingly and only in really extreme situations.

Let’s take a look at the three times it has been invoked in our history.

The first such instance involved President Andrew Johnson immediately following our Civil War. The radical Republican Congress did not think that Johnson, a Democrat who assumed office following the Lincoln assassination, was being punitive enough in the way he was dealing with the defeated Confederate states. They brought charges against him for trying to replace his Secretary of War against the wishes of Congress and he was saved from removal by a single vote in the U.S. Senate.

The next time impeachment was attempted involved Richard Nixon and Watergate. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice in 1974, but he resigned before the matter could come to a vote in the full House. Even a number of Republicans supported the impeachment of the president of their own party.

That brings up to Bill Clinton. The full House voted to impeach him for actions taken in connection with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but the U.S. Senate refused to convict him. As a member of the House, I voted against impeaching Clinton on the basis that these matters were not serious enough to constitute removing a president even though they were an embarrassment to his office.

Republicans lost House seats in the 1998 mid-term elections at least partially because the public thought they had over-reacted in trying to remove Clinton from office.

It is instructive that impeachment has only passed the House twice in our history (though it clearly would have passed a third time had Nixon not preempted a vote by resigning). Our system of government has survived because we have taken our constitution seriously and not trivialized it by trying to remove every president we didn’t like.

You can make an argument that the conduct of both Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon merited the possibility of removal from office. Reasonable people cannot, with a straight face, argue that Bill Clinton should have faced impeachment for sexual indiscretions. If so, then there are several other presidents and countless members of Congress who could have seen their careers cut short.

Democrats who don’t like George W. Bush should get together and have a party where they can swap stories about what a dreadful job he has done in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, what an inadequate job his military planners did in dealing with Iraq following the removal of Saddam Hussein, what a poor job his intelligence chiefs did in evaluating the weapons of mass destruction potential in Iraq, and how his administration for a long time looked the other way while oil company profits and gasoline prices went up.

And then they should stop talking about impeachment.

Even the argument about Bush’s approval of domestic spying without a warrant does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense in my judgement. He was acting in good faith in an effort to defend our nation from terrorism, and the legality of his actions have yet to be resolved in court. I personally think he was wrong to approve such spying without a warrant, but I would not consider impeachment as an appropriate remedy.

For Democrats who are really angry at the job this president has done, the best remedy is to work hard to elect more Democrats to the House and Senate this Fall. That’s the ultimate revenge.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,196549,00.html

Forum posts

  • Martin Frost should be made the poster child for "Muddled Thinking."

  • Why should any intelligent American listen to the opinions of the anoited mouth pieces of the White House, FAUX News reporters? Why should anyone at all listen to the viewpoint of the most duplicitous, deceitful of all the major US broadcasting outlets? How can anyone in their right mind confuse Bush’s obvious dictatorial push for power with mere incompetence, or worse the whining of ’loonies’ and ’liberals’? Just to set you straight, Mr. Frost here are some facts that either you don’t know about or just don’t want your listening public to know:

    The following are Conservative organizations that have already expressed their outrage with this lawless administration:
    The Cato Institute, the American Conservative, www.republicansforhumility.com.
    The best and brightest of American Conservatives have already abandoned this fake ’Conservative’ President, something Mr. Frost and FAUX News would rather not disclose to the general public. Even William F. Buckley, Jr. is no longer on their side. Is he a loony liberal as well, Mr. Frost?

    This is what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had to say about the latest violation of the US Constitution by this demented President: "I cannot defend the indefensible...I believe that what they did (sic. the White House) cannot be defended by reasonable people".
    Is Newt Gingrich a loonie liberal as well, Mr. Frost?

    NO, he is not. He is a real Conservative who understands the importance of all the checks and balances in our Constitution, who understands that without those checks and balances our Constitution and our freedom are nothing but illusions.
    Let’s face it, Mr. Frost, you are definitely a well paid mouth piece, and like all well paid mouth pieces you don’t believe in anything at all except in whomever signs your paychecks. Neither you nor your untrustworthy organization have the American people’s interests in mind at all, that is so obvious after reading this propagandistic dribble that you wrote here. We haven’t forgotten that Fox Broadcasting has received over $300 million from the White House for ’public relations’ these last two years, or are you going to call the Government Accounting Office liars?

    And as for the Democratic party, who cares? This joke of a two-party system is about to come to an end, Mr. Frost. The Dims and the Repukables will soon become obsolete as the American people grow more aware and more angry as to how well they have been duped by both the White House and its den of paid goons, the US mass media. We draw the line here. We vote INDEPENDENT and peacefully crush this corrupt house of cards you have helped construct, for if we don’t, we will all take another step closer to becoming a police state, bereft of all moral and legal authority.

    Mr. Frost and FAUX News are clearly not on the side of the American people.
    The latest Newsweek poll, dated May 22, 2006, shows that 53% of those polled say that Bush has gone too far. Only 23% believe that our country is on the right track, the lowest figures in Newsweek poll taking history.
    Those numbers will definitely grow worse for you and your embattled President as the months go by faster than a bat out of hell.
    You stand to lose quite a bit of your ratings prowess, Mr. Frost, when more and more Americans realize that they don’t need FAUX News, or CNN, or NBC to get accurate and TRUTHFUL reporting. The net will make you obsolete very quickly, the least you and your organization can do is make an honest effort in becoming an organization of journalistic integrity, instead of being the most overpaid Ministers of Propaganda in history.

  • Fox needs to be handled, too. It should be against the law to bring opinions as facts or not researched and complete news. Fox does the job, which Hitlers minister of information Goebbles did.
    The reason why not all American people against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is, they listen to the wonderful messages from stations like FOX news, which tells them how wonderful it must be for a population to get bombed, tortured, imprisioned and murdered. Are these really acts of freedom?
    Also the mourning for American mercenarious - troops - who knew very well what could happen to them especial if the fight the war of crime.

    Memorial day is the day, when Americans think of their butcher troops.

    • I think we need to go further, that it’s time for some for some form of antitrust legislation to break the monopoly of major media outlets. Not only are we becoming a single party system, we are also becoming a single media outlet, with a mere handful of interests owning a vast majority of newspapers, radio and television "new" that acts as a propaganda machine rather than a truthseeking "fourth column" of government.