David Bromwich
The Power of Inspection and the Claim of Impeachment
...............
Against impeachment, there is this to be said, that the majority apparently lack
the votes to make it succeed. Yet Nancy Pelosi showed a remarkable absence of
political mind when, as the leader of a new majority in a critical time, facing
a president out of control, she declared that impeachment was not an option.
You
don't reassure an opponent--especially an opponent who understands nothing but
the language of force--that the one weapon he rightly fears has been taken out
of your arsenal. Besides, there are powers of inspection short of impeachment,
which the Democratic Congress has been inexplicably backward in using. Dick
Cheney has never held a press conference, and has seldom been asked to answer a
question. His chief of staff, David Addington, is unknown on Capitol Hill. Why
have they never been called to testify? Say by the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee (for misconduct in the control of post-invasion Iraq)? Or the Senate
Intelligence Committee (for the slanting of estimates on Iraq in 2002-03, on
Iran in 2006, on Syria in 2007)? Or by the Judiciary Committee (for overturning
in secret the constitutional ban on torture and the legal restrictions on
domestic surveillance)? When one thinks of the public education on the war in
Vietnam that was supplied by the Foreign Relations Committee under Senator
William Fulbright,
nothing except timidity and a failure of self-respect can
explain the omission of such hearings today...All fanatics are dangerous; and not all of them know this about themselves; but the
fanatics of this administration and their propagandists, do indeed know it, and
they have begun to turn "dangerous" into a term of praise. They truly believe
the surest way to reform the Middle East is to revolutionize the entire region
through the engineered collapse of several governments at once, or in close
succession. A much larger war triggered by accident, and a mounting series of
escalations, would also bury their responsibility in the confusion, chaos, and
desolation that followed.
But to carry it off
they need the American people to be their accomplices. And
that is where the salutary shadow of impeachment may matter. Even if it remains
a discussion only, the threat could remind the public, and give notice to TV
presenters innocent of political knowledge, that there is an unpleasant smell,
a suspicion probably worth exploring, about the familiar crooked path to the
next war. There is something finally neither admirable nor laughable about the
men who have done these things to our country.
more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/the-power-of-inspection-a_b_70594.html
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