Impeach Cheney first

Today, as noted in Crablaw and other places, Crablaw is hosting a blogswarm on the proposed impeachment of President Bush or of any other impeachable federal officer.

If this President and Vice-President don't deserve impeachment, none ever will. Witness the President's asleep-at-the-wheel performance up to September 11, 2001, when suddenly the "vague" warnings on his intelligence briefings came true. Neither his civil nor his military aviation agencies were prepared; none were able to prevent the hijackings or stop them once they were under way.

Witness the President's performance after September 11: in a whirlwind burst of new-found energy, he invaded Afghanistan, toppling the government that hosted the man he held responsible for the hijackings but somehow failing to apprehend the man himself. The man himself remains at large, probably in Pakistan; somehow our "friendly" relations with the current governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan are not enough to induce either government to go in and get him; apparently it's not important enough to us to go in and get him ourselves, with or without their permission.

After September 11, the entire civilized world was on our side -- for a few months. But the arrogance of the President and his administration soon took care of that.

On the home front, we have the Patriot Act -- an obscene carte blanche for wholesale government invasion of privacy and violation of civil and human rights.

Then there's the Iraq war, largely a creation of the Vice-President. He cherry-picked intelligence to arrive at the conclusion he wanted; he and his neo-conservative cronies participated in a mass delusion of a kind of benign domino effect in the Middle East, where taking out Saddam Hussein and transforming Iraq into a democracy would result in the inexorable spread of secular democracy all over the Middle East. Obviously, this grand scheme hasn't worked; equally obviously, it never could have worked; equally obviously, it is a violation of international law to impose one's nation-building schemes on others with tanks, planes, bombs and guns.

Again on the home front, we have surveillance of US citizens in violation of the law -- a law so generously written that court permission for wiretaps can be obtained after the fact. And the President and Vice-President couldn't be bothered to do even that much.

Overseas again, we have "extraordinary rendition" -- that is, the apprehension and confinement of people, sometimes US citizens, in secret or not-so-secret prisons on foreign soil, without charge, trial, or access to legal counsel. Some of these people were entirely innocent. Some have been subjected to "aggressive interrogation techniques" -- that is, tortured, either by US agents or by foreign stooges. Some are still being held, in violation of international agreements on human rights, in violation of the Constitution.

Here and overseas, we have pervasive cronyism, incompetence, corruption, and a Stalinist approach to science. A do-nothing non-entity was put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; its response to Hurricane Katrina is well known. Billions of dollars have simply disappeared in Iraq. Climatologists and the former Surgeon General have had their reports edited and/or suppressed when they expressed inconvenient truths about global warming, the failure of abstinence-only sex education, and other bits of reality that didn't fit the administration's agenda.

I have lived through the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. I have never seen an administration more incompetent, more corrupt, more prone to spy on citizens and suppress free speech than this one. I have never before seen the use of torture defended by my President (or Vice-President, or Attorney General).

I have never before been so ashamed to be an American. Every day that Bush and Cheney remain in office adds to our shame.