Dick Cheney

We Need to Demand Hearings!

dlindorff — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:03:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

We've seen what happens when Congress forgoes the time-tested
process of deliberative and investigative hearings and simply takes a
floor vote on a Bush Administration-backed measure. First there was the
October 18, 2001 resolution for use of military force against Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Because there were no hearings on that measure, its
loose, deliberately ambiguous wording has been used ever since by the
Bush/Cheney crew as authorization for their global so-called "War" on
Terror, including the claim that the president has the dictatorial
power ignore treaties, US law, and bills passed by the Congress.
Shortly thereafter, there was the Patriot Act, a compendium of
anti-Democratic measures that had failed to win passage in Congress
over the years which were cobbled together in the dead of night by
Bush/Cheney zealots and passed on a voice vote the next day by a
Congress too cowed to hold hearings on the measure. Then, in October
2002, there was the second authorization for use of military force
resolution, this time against Iraq, which has ended up miring the US in
a disastrous five-year-long war without end that has killed 4500
Americans, chewed up 40,000 more, and killed in excess of one million
innocent Iraqi civilians.

Had there been serious hearings on any of these three terrible
measures, there is a chance none of them would have passed, or that at
least, had they been passed, they would have been reworded to tie the
administration's hands. The first AUMF could have limited military
actions to attacking Al Qaeda. Period. The Patriot Act's constitutional
overrides could have been exposed early, and challenged. And the
administration's lies about the alleged threats posed by Iraq could
have been challenged in public by other witnesses, plus a clear
requirement could have been included that any attack on Iraq would need
UN authorization.

Now Congress is being pressured to pass an equally horrific bill
with no hearings. We know that 200 leading economists, including at
least three Nobel Laureates, one of them former World Bank economist
Joseph Stiglitz, are opposed to the bailout, saying throwing a trillion
dollars at Wall Street won't work and will be a waste of taxpayer money
or worse. We know that it fails to address the root problem--the
housing and mortgage crisis. We know that it could be a crippling blow
to the dollar. Yet without hearings to expose this giant scam, the only
ones getting through to members of Congress are Wall Street lobbyists,
their pockets stuffed with campaign cash.

Citizens can't even get past the Capitol switchboard, which is
jammed with angry callers trying to get through to their
representatives and senators.

The point that needs to be made is that there is no great urgency to
pass a bill. The administration's claim that the bottom will fall out
of the economy and that the country will be plunged into a depression
if the bill isn't passed immediately is nonsense. The Great Depression
took years to develop after the 1929 stock market crash.

The current market could collapse, and there'd be plenty of time to
act to revive the national economy. Meanwhile, the credit crisis, which
is serious, has been underway for months and months. It is not
something that came up last week and needs to be resolved tomorrow (as
if that were possible by the mere passing of a give-away bill). There
is plenty of time to hold the kind of hearings that will let members of
Congress, and the American public, learn about the causes of the
crisis, of its impacts, and about what the various strategies are that
might most effectively address it.

So the public demand should not be for passage of a "good" bailout
bill. It should be for a halt to this rush to passage of any bill. The
demand should be for "No Bill Without Hearings!"

So call Congress (202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498) and
tell your representative and your two senators that you don't want them
railroaded. Tell them you demand hearings before legislation. And tell
them, again, that you will vote against anyone who votes for the
current bailout for Wall Street. (Hint: If you can't get through, then
call one of their local offices, which are listed in the blue pages of
your phonebook, or go visit a local office.)

Don't forget to write letters, too, to your local paper demanding hearings and a reasoned response to the crisis, not a bailout.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Experience is Over-Rated

dlindorff — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:25:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin stated again, most recently in her interview yesterday
by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, that she has foreign policy experience because
as governor of Alaska she has been in charge of that state’s National
Guard, and because Alaska is, doggone it, “right next” to Russia.

This made me feel pretty good, because it made me realize that I
have a whole lot of skills and experience which I hadn’t really
appreciated before and that I could perhaps use to get myself out of
this freelance journalism profession, which is not all that great from
a financial perspective.

I, for instance, live very close to the garage where my mechanic
works (I mean, I drive past the place every day and even buy my gas
there), so I’m ready to be a car mechanic (I can’t tell you how many
cars I’ve seen being gone over there, and have even sometimes watched a
bit as my own vehicles were up on the lift). I also live literally
across the street from a large forest, which qualifies me to be a
number of things—forest ranger, lumberjack, and perhaps naturalist.

I’ve also been to the doctor many times, so maybe I should hang a
shingle and open up a medical practice. I swear I’ve got all those exam
questions by memory at this point, and they’ve got nurses to do the
stuff with the arm cuff and the stethoscope.

Of course, the real money these days is in law, and there I’ve really got it nailed. Not only do several lawyers live right in my neighborhood,
but I’ve actually been in court and seen lawyers at work. For that
matter, I even had a lawyer argue a case for me once, when I was being
charged with trespassing at the Pentagon. He wasn’t successful at
getting my fine and jail time dropped, but hey, you learn from other
people’s failures, too. Furthermore, I actually wrote a book with a co-author who is a lawyer. With all that experience, I could certainly be an attorney.

Over the years, I’ve spent time at the seashore, and even went on a
one-week ocean sailing trip, so you’d have to admit oceanography is
almost in my blood. Or perhaps I could be a sea captain. I’m sure I
could do at least as well as the captain of the Exxon Valdez tanker.

Come to think of it, back when I was 16, I hitchhiked up to Alaska
with a friend and spent the summer thumbing around the state, so I know
that place like the back of my hand, which means if Sarah Palin gets
elected and goes to Washington, maybe I could be governor of Alaska.
And then, as governor I’d be commander of a National Guard unit, so I’d
be qualified to be a vice president, or, should the opportunity present
itself, even president of the United States. Actually, I’d be maybe
more experienced than Palin for the job, because I grew up in
Connecticut, and thanks to the small size of the states in my native
New England, have actually been living closer to a foreign
country—Canada—than she, living in Wasilla, has been living to Russia.
In other words, when you think of it, my foreign policy experience is
much greater than hers. Besides, I’ve actually visited Canada a few times, which really boosts my experience in international affairs.

I know some people think that jumping into jobs like president or
vice president of the United States based upon what they might perceive
as limited experience is presumptuous, but that’s because they aren’t
being fair and open-minded. And I’ll admit that it’s hard, with
relatively limited experience, to expect someone like Palin or me to
measure up to the standard of someone like our current vice president,
Dick Cheney, who came to his position after having served previously as
presidential chief of staff, as secretary of defense, and as a member
of Congress. I mean, that’s real experience, and it shows in the fine
job he’s done as VP.

But we shouldn’t let examples like Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld,
another guy who took an important government post—in his case Secretary
of Defense—after having considerable prior experience—make us obsess
about experience. I mean, look at our current president. George W. Bush
got elected in 2000, when his experience consisted of just two terms as
governor of Texas, a state where the governor has a largely ceremonial
role and most of the real work of government is handled by the
legislature, and look what a great job he did in the White House!
Furthermore, his only military experience was as a pilot in a Texas
National Guard unit, most of which tour of duty he missed because he
decided to work on his father’s failed election campaign instead, and
because he didn’t want to take any drug tests, and look what a fine job
he’s done as commander in chief.

This should all make Americans lighten up and be less snooty and
judgemental about what they demand in terms of experience in
presidential and vice presidential candidates. Palin in my view has proved her qualifications for the job. Yesterday she sent her young son off to battle in Iraq to fight against "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans" on 9-11 seven years ago. What better evidence do we need of this woman's solid grasp of foreign affairs, history and combat?

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Of All the Reasons McCain’s Palin Pick is Awful, Evidence of Her Abuse of Power is the Worst

dlindorff — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:32:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

There are many reasons why most Americans should be turned off by
Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s last-minute choice of
Sarah Palin as his running mate.

She’s an evangelical Christian who believes in creationism and
thinks this fantasy belongs in the school science curriculum alongside
evolution. She’s opposed to the right to abortion. She thinks global
warming is not a proven phenomenon. She favors drilling for oil in the
Arctic Refuge and damn the environmental consequences. This supposedly
family-centered “hockey mom “is happy about sending her 18-year-old son
off to war in Iraq, even as Iraq is trying to shoo us out of the
country and even as the president is tacitly admitting that the whole
thing is a bust by agreeing to a timetable for withdrawal.

But the real reason Palin, the former mayor of little Wasilla,
Alaska (pop. 5000 when she was there) and two-year governor of Alaska,
is a disastrous pick for the vice presidency on a ticket headed by an
ailing 72-year-old presidential candidate who has suffered two bouts of
melanoma and who is showing early signs of dementia, is the evidence
that she has abused power as governor.

We’ve had eight years of a president and vice president who have
abused their executive power, using the awesome capabilities of the
state to spy on Americans, inserting fake news in the media, pressuring
news organizations not to run important stories, silencing protests by
penning in all critics in remote “free speech” zones, attacking
individual critics with White House-directed campaigns that border on
treason, as in the case of the outing of CIA undercover operative
Valerie Plame, whose husband had criticized a Bush argument for
invading Iraq, and threatening government scientists who wanted to
report their legitimate findings on climate change.

We have seen over these past eight years just what abuse of power can do to destroy democratic government and a free society.

So now we have Gov. Palin, whom evidence suggests may have abused
her power as governor of Alaska to fire the state’s public security
director after he blocked her efforts to destroy the career of a
low-level state trooper who happened to be her former brother-in-law,
because she wanted to avenge a sister engaged in an ugly post-divorce
custody dispute.

Published allegations would show that both Gov. Palin’s husband
Todd Palin, and members of her staff, repeatedly called and harangued
state Public Safety Director Walt Monegan, who says he was “pressured”
to fire the brother-in-law, Officer Mike Wooten. The Palins have
charged that Wooten drank beer in his patrol car, hunted moose
illegally and that he once fired his taser at his 11-year-old step
son—charges that Wooten has denied. They have also claimed that Wooten
threatened Sarah Palin’s father—also denied by Wooten.

Also interesting—the charges that were made against Wooten were for
things that he allegedly did years before, and for which, where
appropriate, he had already been disciplined or exonerated by his
employer. That taser incident, if it happened, was when the stepson was
11. The boy, now 17, reportedly lives these days with the allegedly
trigger-happy step dad. The alleged beer and hunting incidents also
predate the divorce, which raises questions of why, if those charges
warranted Wooten’s firing from the police force, the supposedly
ethics-obsessed Palin would not have raised them back at the time with
his superiors.

Palin has improbably denied that she had “anything to do with” her
husband’s calls to Monegan. She subsequently fired Monegan and got his
successor to fire her sister’s ex from the police force. (Her pick to
replace Monegan is being accused of sexual harassment!).

The Republican state legislature has voted $100,000 to fund an
independent investigation into the abuse of power charges against
Palin, and there is talk of a possible impeachment proceeding, too.
Palin has denied that she did anything wrong. The investigation, which
is expected to take three months to complete, will drag on through the
entire presidential election campaign.

One thing is clear: Whatever Palin’s troglodyte social and
political views, Americans don’t need another vice president who views
public office as an opportunity to abuse his or her power for personal
or political vendettas.

The other thing that is clear in all this is that McCain, who is
running for president in part on a claim of competence, has certainly
demonstrated a lack of same in his naming of Palin, whom he reportedly
only decided on this past week and after only speaking with her last
Sunday by phone. (His campaign says he also met her once briefly last
February at a state governors’ convention in Washington.)

The Alaskan “troopergate” abuse of power scandal, which will now
play out through the coming weeks, clearly was not vetted by McCain and
his staff, and no doubt will turn off a lot of one natural Republican
constituency: law enforcement officers, who expect to have any charges
leveled against them handled by due process.

If even some of the charges against Palin are true, her actions
should make her unfit for the office of vice president, particularly on
the ticket with a man who is pushing the actuarial envelope in running
for president.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful

dlindorff — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:08:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I was a speaker last night at an anti-war event sponsored by the
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, Progressive
Democrats of America and Democrats For America in Lincroft, NJ, near
the shore. It was a great group of activist Americans who want to see
this country end the Iraq War, turn away from war as a primary
instrument of policy, and start dealing with the pressing human needs
of the country and the world.

Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up
during the question-and-answer session and said, “I want to get
involved in writing emails to members of Congress urging them to cut
off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that won’t I end
up getting put on a `watch list’” or something?”

I told her the short answer was yes, she probably would. In George
Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s America, no one is safe from such spying, and
even from harassment, as witness Tom Feeley, the man behind the website
Information Clearing House, who had armed men invade his house at night and threaten his wife complaining about his First Amendment-protected effort to publicize important stories on the Internet.

But I also told her that it didn’t matter. She should defend her
freedom of speech and her right to petition for redress of grievances,
just as she was defending her freedom of assembly by attending last
night’s event.

The only demonstrably true statement George Bush has made in his
sorry eight years in office is that the Constitution is “just a
goddamned piece of paper.” While it wasn’t the point he was making,
when he reportedly shouted this at a couple of Republican members of
Congress who were questioning the constitutionality of some of his
actions, he was right that the nation’s founding document is only worth
the parchment and ink it’s composed of, unless people use it and defend
it.

There is a remarkable and palpable fear abroad in this land—not a
fear of terrorism, but a fear of speaking up, a fear of being labeled
as “different” or as a “troublemaker.”
People will lean over and whisper their opinions, if they think they
are anti-Establishment, as though someone might be listening. People
write me after some of my columns run, praising me for my “courage,”
though why it should be perceived as requiring courage to merely write
something in America is beyond me.

The worst thing is that every time someone says she or he is
afraid, or acts afraid to speak or write what she or he is thinking,
five more acquaintances become equally scared and silenced.

The corollary, though, is that each time someone forgets or ignores
or rejects that fear, five people gain courage the do the same thing.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t people monitoring, and
reporting on, what we say. I know our government is busy doing that. I
assume that my Internet activities are being monitored by the National
Security Agency. I assume my phones are tapped. I assume there was some
agent or informant among the fine people at the church last night. But
these Stasi wannabes have no power if we don’t let them frighten us
into silence and inaction.

What I find discouraging is the widespread acceptance, even on the
left, of this effort to intimidate us, and the pervasive attitude of
fear that has grown up around us. I spent a year and a half living in a
truly fascistic society in China, where there are real, concrete
threats to life and liberty faced by those who stand up and say what
they are thinking, and yet sometimes I think that ordinary people I met
in China were braver about stating their minds than many, or even most
Americans are. I’m not talking here about saying things like that you
think the Post Office is dysfunctional, or that you think federal
bureaucrats are corrupt or that taxes are too high. I’m talking about
questioning the system, or challenging the war, or protesting military
spending. Chinese people would tell me all the time that the Chinese
Communist Party was a corrupt gang of thugs or that you could not get
justice in a Chinese court. Chinese people are closing down factories
that short them on their pay. They have rallied in the thousands and
burned down police stations when corrupt police have raped, killed and
then covered up the death of a young girl. They have marched in massive
impromptu protests at the theft of their homes through eminent domain.

If you want to see where we’re headed here in America, check out
the workplace. There, we Americans have, through years of collective
cowardice and unwillingness to stand together in organized labor
unions, allowed our constitutional freedoms to be almost completely
erased. Today, an American workplace is more akin to a police state
than to a democratic society. Say what you’re thinking on the job, and
you’re liable to lose it. Wear a shirt that says something the boss
disagrees with, and you either remove that shirt or you are unemployed.
Even that final refuge of free speech, the bumper sticker, can get
workers in trouble if the wrong one shows up in the company parking
lot. That loss of will and of freedom has in no small way contributed
to the loss of jobs and the decline in living standards of American
workers.

It’s time for all of us to put a stop to this creeping usurpation of our liberties.

The anxious woman who asked her question came up to me after the
meeting and said proudly that she would not be afraid, and would start
signing on to protest letter-writing and emailing campaigns.

We need lots more like her.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/35723';
digg_title = "The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n I was a speaker last night at an anti-war event sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, Progressive Democrats of America and Democrats For America in Lincroft, NJ, near the shore. It was a great group of activist Americans who want to see this country end the Iraq War, turn away from war as a primary instrument of policy, and start dealing with the pressing human needs of the country and the world.\r\n\r\n Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up during the question-and-answer session and said, “I want to get involved in writing emails to members of Congress urging them to cut off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that won’t I end up getting put on a `watch list’” or something?”\r\n\r";
digg_skin = 'standard';

Cheney Tied to Ted Stevens' Bribery Scandal

Bob Fertik — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:39:03 -0400

ThinkProgress:

Newsweek reports that in a conversation “secretly tape-recorded by the FBI on June 25, 2006,” Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) “discussed ways to get a pipeline bill through the Alaska Legislature with Bill Allen, an oil-services executive accused of providing the senator with about $250,000 in undisclosed financial benefits.” Stevens promised Allen, “I’m gonna try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here and say, ‘Look … you gotta get this done’.” Two days later, Vice President Cheney undertook the unusual move of writing a letter to the Alaska Legislature urging members to “promptly enact” a bill to build the pipeline.

To summarize: Bill Allen is accused of bribing Ted Stevens to get his pipeline deal approved by the Alaska Legislature. Stevens promised "bigwigs" would help. Two days later, Cheney helped.

Cheney may or may not have been bribed directly, but he participated in a bribery scheme. Former Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) went to jail for a similar scheme involving Jack Abramoff.

The Constitution is crystal clear on bribery; after treason, it is the gravest possible offense:

The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

So when will Congress impeach Dick Cheney?

Remembering When the Government Was at Least Approachable

dlindorff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:26:59 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We’ve come a long way towards imperial government in the US—towards
a view of the relationship between the federal government, and
especially the administration, and the citizenry that has more of a
ruler-subjects than a democratic feel to it.

Now I know it is easy to gloss over the way things were, and since I
spent a few days in federal prison for protesting the Indochina War at
the Pentagon in 1967, after being beaten by federal marshals for doing
nothing more than exercising my constitional right to protest on public
ground, I am well aware that 40 years ago we were also often treated
like serfs. But that said, there was something different back then—a
sense that you could deal with powerful officials as an equal.

Back in the summer of 1968, I spent one of several summers on the
road (something more young people should do today). I had hitch-hiked
across the country from Connecticut to Washington state with Allen
Baker, a college buddy, and then, towards the end of that summer break,
had bought an old pick-up truck for $100, which we were driving home
via the West Coast and the central route. Not having much cash, we were
stopping at cities along the way, where I would play guitar for gas
money.

This was the late ‘60s, and there was a major and sometimes violent
culture war underway between the long-hairs like me and the clean-cut
American “Silent Majority,” and my travel companion, Allen, and I were
concerned that it would be tough scaring up much cash in the vast
Republican stretches of desert, mountains and prairie that lay between
Nevada and Missouri. So when we passed through Yosemite National Park,
we decided to spend a day in the valley’s main parking lot, raising
donations from tourists.

While Allen dozed in the back of the truck, I opened my guitar case
and put up the “Gas Money” sign, and then, sitting on the running board
of the old Dodge, started to play.

The money poured in—over a hundred dollars in a fairly short amount
of time. It was really astounding. People walking by really enjoyed the
music and wanted to help us out.

Then a park ranger, an older fellow with a friendly smile, drove up.
“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically, “but I have been told to arrest
you.”

“What for?” I asked, genuinely shocked.

“There’s no panhandling allowed in the park,” he responded.

“What’s panhandling?” I asked him, genuinely unaware of the meaning
of the term, which I, an Easterner, thought must have to do with
cooking with a skittle on an open fire.

“It’s what you’re doing right now,” the ranger said.

By that point, Allen had woken up and sat up in the truck bed, rubbing his eyes.

“You’ll have to come in too,” the ranger told him.

We followed him back to the ranger station, where he proceeded to
write up our tickets. I noticed that there were two actual jail cells
in the station. Thankfully, at least we weren’t going to be locked up.
Then there was a loud bang outside. Suddenly, a younger ranger, looking
like a recent Marine veteran, muscled and crewcut, ran in. “Where’s the
first aid kit,” he yelled. “ I was just bringing in a kid on a
marijuana charge and he tried to run. I shot him in the leg.”

Whoa! I thought. This is Dodge City!

The older ranger told his partner where to get the kit, and then
turned his attention back to us. “Here are your tickets,” he said. “And
don’t skip out on them. This is a federal offense, and the FBI will
come after you if you don’t pay it.”

We left the building, and only then did I look at my ticket closely.
The fine: $500! It was a fortune back then. Even today it is a big
whopper—especially as a penalty for being poor.

I was pretty upset. That was about how much I had earned towards college that whole summer.

Well, the $100 I’d earned panhandling in the park got us back across the country, at least.

When I got home to Connecticut, though, my fine was rankling. Angry
at the injustice of it all, I typed up a letter to the Secretary of the
Interior, who at the time was Stewart Udall. I wrote about the shooting
incident, saying that I thought it was an outrage that an unarmed young
man arrested on a minor charge like marijuana possession would be shot
in a national park, and I also wrote that it was unfair to fine someone
$500 for simply playing music in a park parking lot. “I wasn’t
bothering people,” I wrote. “In fact, they were coming up to me to hear
the music, and the $100 they tossed into my guitar case is testimony to
the fact that they liked what I was doing. That isn’t panhandling, and
in any case, it’s pretty nasty to fine someone $500 when he’s doing
something because he needs money.”

About two weeks later, I got my letter back from the Department of
Interior. On it, in red ink, Udall himself had written, “I agree.
Forget your ticket. It’s been taken care of. Stewart Udall.”

I have tried to imagine that same situation happening today. First
of all, the unfortunate hippie who got shot that time long ago would
probably have been killed, because the ranger would have been carrying
a more high-powered weapon, and wouldn’t have even been aiming to
disable. Second, Allen and I would probably have been put on some
database at the Pentagon, the FBI and the Transportation Security
Administration, and would have been barred from flying or entering any
national parks. More importantly, though, I tried to imagine the
response I would have gotten writing to current Interior Secretary Dirk
Kempthorne to complain about an arrest for panhandling. Or to his
predecessor, Gale Norton. This is, after all, a department that has
instructed its rangers at the Grand Canyon and other parks not to talk
about evolution, and those at the Everglades National Park not to talk
about global warming and the inevitability that rising ocean levels
will swallow that sea-level park in this generation. Under both
secretaries, the Interior Department has played a key role in the Bush
administration’s efforts to alter and to selectively censor government
scientific reports on evidence of climate change.

I’m not saying it was all sweetness and light back in the ‘60s, or
even that Stu Udall was representative of all government officials in
the Johnson years, but there clearly was a different sense back then
that ordinary citizens had a right to communicate directly with their
leaders and to expect some kind of response.

Nixon began the end of all that, with his Imperial Presidency. It
wasn’t just his penchant for secrecy, though that was legendary. It was
his desire to make the government something more remote and feared,
something imposing and awesome, rather than down-to- earth and
accessible. President Carter, to his credit, went a long way towards
reversing that trend, but over the years it has continued, with Bush
and Cheney taking it to an extreme. Today the White House is a bunker.
Federal police carry assault weapons. Snipers man the roof of the White
House. People who write letters of complaint to minor federal officials
can end up being strip-searched and arrested.

And from the looks of things, it may not be much better even if
Obama takes over the White House. The first day of the Democratic
Convention in Denver saw anti-war protesters penned into the same kinds
of “free-speech zones” that the Bush/Cheney administration has made
into standard features of any “public” appearance they put in, while
AT&T, the company that brought us the convention, kept even
credentialed reporters away from a private party the company threw for
those Democrats in Congress who obligingly passed immunity legislation
to protect the company from lawsuits by those whose communications were
spied on by Bush’s National Security Agency. (Obama supported the
immunity legislation.)

So even as we are all being reduced to a nation of panhandlers, it
may be a long time before we can expect a handwritten letter from the
secretary of the Interior Department or of federal department, or for
help in getting off an unfair ticket.
___________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Foreign Policy and National Security Are Not the Same Thing

dlindorff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:27:10 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms “National Security” and “Foreign Policy” by both Republicans and Democrats.

Granted that the history of US foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America’s instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as “national security” issues.

In Bush-speak, national security come to mean having big guns, lots of heavily armed troops, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, naval armadas and a bully’s willingness to use these weapons on a whim, with no thought of consequences.

The term is kind of oxymoronic, since it is clear that by resorting to war and to threats of war, and by squandering unprecedented sums of money on the military, eight years of bellicosity has not made the nation more secure. Quite the opposite: The military has been run into the ground, the economy has been bankrupted, education, healthcare and other critical national services have been shortchanged, and the country has become a pariah state, viewed around the world as a loose cannon and a terror nation—hardly a comforting position to be in.

Foreign policy, meanwhile, has ceased to have any meaning at all, beyond the making of war or threats of war, making it virtually synonymous with the term national security.

When I was a Fulbright professor in China, back in 1991, at a mid-year conference in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, we grantees were addressed by the head of the Fulbright Program in China, a cultural affairs director from the US embassy in Beijing. He informed us that as teachers (I was teaching journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai), we Fulbrighters were the frontline of American foreign policy in China. Most of us were kind of repulsed by his semi-military allusion to a battle line and by implication to us as soldiers, and we chose instead to see our role as something different: emissaries from the American people to the Chinese people. In fact, given that most of the 21 of us were hardly superpatriots or cold warriors (the academics, journalists, lawyers and other professionals who serve in the Fulbright Program tend demographically to be among the most liberal and left-leaning group in the American workforce), we would have made a pretty bad defense line. Rather, what we were doing in China, by teaching and building relationships with young Chinese college students, was the essence of real foreign policy—building bridges at the grass roots level between the people of China and the people of the US.

Foreign policy can be reduced to a strategic chess game—the kind of “real politik” practiced by Klemens von Metternich in the 19th Century, or espoused by Henry Kissinger in the Nixon years—but it is actually, or at least ought to be, much broader than that kind of cold and calculating manipulation and pursuit of narrow self-interest.

Real foreign policy should be about winning friends, building trust, establishing relationships between countries and peoples, negotiating treaties designed to achieve mutual advantage and to deter aggression. It is about aiding countries that are in need of assistance, and at its best, should also be about making the world a safer, better place for all, which in the end is the best way to guard against war and the threats of war.

Now it would be naïve to imagine a foreign policy that ignored national self-interest. Much as I or others might wish for a world without borders and a common humanity, in a world of nation states, it is inevitable that foreign policy as practiced by any nation, including the United States, will be focused on achieving the maximum benefit for that nation, and US foreign policy has always been about just that, and unfortunately probably always will be. But even granted this selfish parochialism, it is incredibly shortsighted and ignorant to treat foreign policy as simply an America-first process of bullying others into submission to our dictates. Thousands of American teachers and Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers do much more to advance America’s position in the world and to enhance the nation’s security than do hundreds of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs and missiles.

For Republicans, there is no difference between national security, which is defined as a powerful and assertive military, and foreign policy. But Democrats, who at times have had a more nuanced view, have more recently bought into this too. At the current Democratic Convention, anxious to look as tough as Republicans, Democratic speakers have used the terms national security and foreign policy interchangeably.

Afghanistan and Iraq provide excellent cases in point. Clearly, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ostensibly aimed initially at hunting down Al Qaeda fighters and leaders, quickly devolved into an all-out assault on that nation, which has been reduced to the same rubble and state of chaos and civil war as has Iraq. Now, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is talking about expanding the war there, and increasing the killing and destruction in that country. In Iraq, where the US has been involved in an orgy of killing and destruction now for over five years, Obama and fellow Democrats are calling for a “responsible exit” from that conflict over the course of another 16 months. A truly responsible exit would be an immediate withdrawal, a national apology to Iraqis and to the world community, and a massive program of reparations to help rebuild that nation.

What Obama and the Democrats are touting is not foreign policy. It is a continuation of national security run amok.

No amount of American force, no level of mayhem and slaughter, will bring about a secure and tranquil Afghanistan. In fact, every time Americans kill Afghanis, as American bombers recently did, slaughtering 60 children and 30 other adults, women and men, in an aerial bombardment reminiscent of the German Luftwaffe’s attack on the Basque village of Guernica, they produce not peace and submission, but rather hatred and a desire for vengeance.

It will take perhaps a generation of good works for the US to undo the evil done to American foreign relations by eight years of Bush/Cheney obsession with national security, but it doesn’t even look like the Democrats “get it.” In Congress, they have vied with Republicans to look tough, supporting both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, they have supported the continued funding of those wars and increased funding for the already bloated US war machine, and they are now backing Obama’s call for more combat troops in Afghanistan.

Real foreign policy would be looking at ways to work with other nations to bring down the level of combat, and to bring peace to Afghanistan and to other war-torn regions of the world.

Meanwhile, the concept of national security needs to be broadened. As Genghis Khan, conqueror of China, is reputed to have said as a frightened Chinese empire, at extraordinary financial and human cost, constructed the Great Wall to fend him off, “A wall is only as strong as the people behind it.”

One need only drive through any American city today and view the bombed-out neighborhoods, the crack dens, the pot-holed streets, the decrepit transit systems, the shamefully overcrowded and prison-like schools where any teaching and learning that goes on is an accident, one need only visit ignored and forgotten rural areas of America where unemployment is the norm and healthcare is half a day’s drive and half a year’s income away, one need only drive through a suburban neighborhood and look at all the “For Sale” and even more pathetic “For Sale: Reduced Price!” signs in front of houses, to see that what lies behind America’s walls, like the ridiculous one being built now along parts of the border with Mexico, is incredible weakness. (At the rate things are going here, it won’t be long before Americans will be scaling that wall to find jobs in Mexico!)

The folly of conflating national security and foreign policy, and of imagining that a mindless willingness to resort to force and bullying is the sine qua non for being “presidential,” has been made painfully clear not only in the screams of wounded children in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the cries of hungry children in America. The United States does not need a man of war in the White House. It needs a wise advocate of peace.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Huffing and Puffing at the Pentagon

dlindorff — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:02:26 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

American Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one. “Clearly, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."

Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the US, where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.

But Gates doesn’t speak with such clarity and directness in other matters. "I think that there is a real concern that Russia has turned the corner here and is headed back toward its past rather than toward its future, and my hope is that we will see actions in the weeks and months to come that provide us some reassurance," he said, speaking on ABC and CNN, claiming that the country was returning to the authoritarianism of the old Soviet era.

Ahem.

It might also be noted that the US is heading increasingly towards an authoritarian future, no? Certainly over the course of the last seven years we have seen the executive branch in the US claim that it no longer needs to enact or adhere to laws passed by Congress or to terms of international treaties approved by the Senate. We have also seen this administration refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas for information and testimony from White House officials, effectively establishing the presidency as a dictatorship, have we not?

As for Gates’ condemnation of Russia for resorting to force in Georgia, one need not defend Russia’s actions there to note that such tactics have long been deemed fully appropriate in the US. Only recently America used force to depose an elected government in Haiti, hustling its elected president off into exile. The US has also been working assiduously through covert means to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, even supporting (and probably helping to organize) a temporarily successful military coup there. Then of course there is the decades-long effort by the US to overthrow the government of Cuba, which has included everything from invasions and embargos to multiple assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Russia is clearly moving in an authoritarian direction at home, and is reasserting its influence and control over some—though hardly all—of the states that were formerly part of the USSR. But in all of this it is merely aping the behavior of the US government, which is becoming more authoritarian also, and which has always been a bully in its local neighborhood.

If Gates has anything legitimate to complain about it is that the American military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its preoccupation with drumming up conflict with Iran, have rendered the Pentagon almost impotent when it comes to threatening Russia.

All that is left for Gates to do is huff and puff about Russia backsliding to the bad old days when it was able to stand up to the US as an equal.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Shoot Your Friends First: The Cheney Doctrine

dlindorff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:28:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

Besides, Cheney is in good company in this kind of thinking. We know
from reports of the meeting filed by British intelligence that
President Bush engaged in the same kind of thing when he was having
trouble getting the country and the rest of the civilized world behind
his and Cheney’s plan to attack Iraq. It was disclosed years later that
in early 2003, Bush suggested to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US
could paint a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and fly it over sensitive
parts of Iraqi airspace, so that Saddam Hussein would order it show
down. That, he argued, would anger enough UN member states to win a
security resolution to support a war on Iraq, and failing that, would
give the US an excuse to go in on its own. Blair was reportedly
horrified at this kind of kamikaze thinking—but not horrified enough to
expose the president as a nutcase.

So that’s where we are today folks. A president and a vice president
who both think that it’s a great idea to either send some of your own
troops under false flags into harm’s way to get shot at so you can
start a war, or, even worse, to dress up some of your soldiers as the
enemy you want to go after, and have them open fire on your own guys so
that you can claim you were attacked, and then go to war.

Who gets tricked by all these mad schemes?

Not the Iranians, or in the earlier instance, the Iraqis. They know
they aren’t attacking American forces. No. It’s us, the American
people, who are being tricked. Cheney knows that most Americans think
the idea of attacking Iran—especially when we’re five years into an
interminable war in Iraq and seven years into another war in
Afghanistan, neither of which has an end in sight—is really, really
stupid. So they’re trying to think up a way to trick us into supporting
doing such a stupid thing. And the only thing they can come up with to
overcome our reticence is making us think that our guys are being
attacked.

Now let me say that I’ve been a skeptic about people who claim the
9-11 attacks were an “inside job”—that the US government actually
organized those attacks. I know all the arguments and evidence, but it
always seemed to me that it was over the top to think that our leaders
would try to deliberately kill Americans in order to achieve some
policy goal. And yet, here we have Dick Cheney, the real brains (such
as they are) behind the Bush administration, discussing a plan, using
American forces, to fake an attack on other American forces.

It makes me wonder whether maybe Cheney deliberately shot his friend
Harry Whittington, either to flush those damned elusive quail he was
after, or so that he could generate public sympathy for the embattled
President Bush. And it even makes me wonder whether crazy Dick actually
did have a hand in bringing down those Twin Towers. He may be too
stupid to pull something like that off, but he has made it clear that
it isn’t moral scruples that would prevent him from doing such a
monstrous thing.

As ludicrous, pathetic and outrageous as this administration is, we
need to take this latest Hersh report seriously. It seems clear that
Cheney has a predilection for using fratricide to achieve his nefarious
ends.

It’s one thing when he does it with his own rifle, though. It’s
another when he does it with the world’s most mighty military machine.
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Friday's House Judiciary Hearing on Impeachment: A Victory and a Challenge

dlindorff — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:34:40 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power
held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged
farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a
grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both
testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and
of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the
enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy
by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

As Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the committee, made clear
more than once during the six-hour session, this was “not an
impeachment hearing, however much many in the audience might wish it to
be” He might well have added that he himself was not the fierce
defender of the Constitution and of the authority of Congress that he
once was before gaining control of the Judiciary Committee, however
much his constituents, his wife, and Americans across the country might
wish him to be.

At the same time, while the hearing was strictly limited to the
most superficial airing of Bush administration crimes and misdemeanors,
the fact that the session—technically an argument in defense of 36
articles of impeachment filed in the House over the past several months
by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)--was nonetheless a major victory for the
impeachment movement. It happened because earlier in the month, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has sworn since taking control of the
House in November 2006, that impeachment would be “off the table”
during the 110th Congress, called a hasty meeting with Majority Leader
Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Conyers, and Rep. Kucinich, and called
for such a limited hearing.

It was no coincidence that shortly before Pelosi’s backdown, peace
activist and Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan announced that her campaign
had collected well over the 10,000 signatures necessary to qualify for
listing on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress against
Pelosi in the Speaker’s home district in San Francisco. Sheehan has
been an outspoken advocate of impeaching both Bush and Cheney. “Pelosi
is trying to throw a bone to her constituents by allowing a hearing on
impeachment,” said Sheehan, who came to Washington, DC to attend. “It’s
just like her finally stating publicly that Bush’s presidency is a
failure—something it has taken her two years to come to, but which
we’ve been saying for years.”

So determined were Pelosi and Conyers to limit the scope and
intensity of the hearing that they acceded to a call for Republicans on
the Judiciary Committee to adhere to Thomas Jefferson’s Rules of the
House, which prohibit any derogatory comments about the President,
which was interpreted by Chairman Conyers as meaning no one, including
witnesses or members of the committee, could suggest that Bush had lied
or deceived anyone. Since a number of Rep. Kucinich’s proposed articles
of impeachment specifically charge the president with lying to Congress
and the American People, this made for some comic moments, with witness
Bruce Fein, a former assistant attorney general under former President
Ronald Reagan, to say he would reference his listing of crimes to the
“resident” of the White House.

In the end, the rule imposing a gag on calling the president a
criminal fell by the wayside, with witness Vincent Bugliosi. A former
Los Angeles deputy district attorney, accusing Bush of being guilty of
the murder of over 4000 American soldiers and of hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqi civilians because he had “lied” the country into an
illegal and unnecessary war, and with committee member Shiela Jackson
Lee (D-TX) suggesting that the president may have committed treason in
invading Iraq, and that he appeared to be preparing to do it again with
an unprovoked invasion of Iran.

Conyers also acquiesced in a Republican effort to minimize public
monitoring and involvement in the hearing, allowing the minority party
to fill most of the available seats in the hearing room with office
staffers who showed little interest in the proceedings. Only a few
dozen of the hundreds of pro-impeachment activists who had come to the
Rayburn Office Building at 7 am in order to get seats in the Judiciary
Committee hearing room were allowed in, with the rest having to remain
in the hall or go to two remote “overflow” rooms to watch the
proceedings on a TV hookup. Conyers also went along with a call by
Republican members of the committee to have some of those who did make
it into the hearing ejected simply for wearing buttons on their shirts
calling for impeachment (the Republican members referred to these as
“signs”), though such small personal tokens are routinely allowed in
congressional hearing rooms.

It was clear that this was to be a tightly controlled and strictly limited hearing.

It was also clear that it was intended to go nowhere.

At one point, after hearing witnesses like Fein, Bugliosi, former
representative and Nixon impeachment committee member Elizabeth
Holtzman, former Salt Lake City mayor and impeachment activist Rocky
Anderson, former House Clinton impeachment manager Bob Barr, former
Watergate Committee counsel and current senior counsel of the Brennan
Center for Justice Frederick A.O. Schwartz, and Elliott Adams,
president of the board of Veterans for Peace, lay out the
administration’s crimes and abuses of power—which included charges of
usurping the legislative powers of Congress, violating international
treaties, war crimes, lying to Congress, an illegal war, felony
violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth
Amendment, defying Congressional subpoenas, obstruction of justice and
more, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the Constitution
subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, appeared convinced that the
abuses were real and serious.

But Nadler, who for two years has been a major obstacle on the
Judiciary Committee to any efforts to move impeachment to a formal
hearing, said, “No president has been removed from office through
impeachment.” He asked the witnesses, “How would you approach
impeachment today so it would be a viable option?”

Former Rep. Holtzman responded, “The real remedy to a president who
believes he is above the law is impeachment. There is no running away
from that.” She said, “An impeachment inquiry, handled fairly, could
work. Maybe I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I believe it could work.”

The basic point, made by Holtzman, by Fein and by many others,
including this writer, is that worrying about the political opposition
to impeachment, both in the House, and in the Senate, not to mention
among the broader public, is completely wrongheaded. Even when
impeachment articles were first filed against Nixon, the public and the
bulk of the Congress were against the idea. It was during the hearings
that the tide turned, as evidence of malfeasance, criminality and abuse
of power became evident through hearing testimony. The same would
happen in the case of President Bush and/or Vice President Cheney. Most
Americans don’t even know that the president made up evidence to
justify the war against Iraq out of whole cloth. They don’t know what
the Geneva Conventions are with regard to torture. They don’t know why
Congress passed the FISA act, which Bush has been feloniously violating
to spy on them (it was passed because Nixon was using the National
Security Agency to spy on Americans without judicial warrants!). They
don’t know the Bush has been refusing to enact laws passed by the
Congress. Public hearings by an impeachment panel would make all these
high crimes and misdemeanors clear on national TV to all sentient
Americans. Moreover, as Holtzman pointed out, the president would not
be able to use the claim of “executive privilege” to withhold testimony
from aides in an impeachment inquiry, the way he has done when they
have been subpoenaed by other House and Senate committees. Impeachment
would be about violations of the very executive actions he would be
claiming privilege on. As well, an impeachment committee, unlike any
other committee of the Congress, is specifically sanctioned and
empowered in the Constitution, meaning that even strict
“constructionist” Federalists on the bench would have a hard time
backing presidential obstruction.

As Holtzman noted, “There is no executive privilege in impeachment,
because refusing to testify is itself an impeachable offense.”

Committee Republicans, aided by two law professors they had brought
in to testify, Stephen Presser of Northwestern University School of Law
and Jeremy Rabkin of George Mason University School of Law, tried to
argue that impeachment was only meant for crimes in which the official,
or the president, was seeking personal gain. This nonsense was knocked
down by most of the speakers, who quoted numerous founders who made it
clear that what high crimes referred to were actions—even taken with
the noblest of intentions—that undermined the Constitution or abused
the powers of the office. As Rep. Nadler said, “Impeachment has nothing
to do with intentions or with good faith. Impeachment has to do with
abuse of power which weakens the balance of power.”

In the end, the hearing petered out, taking no action of any
kind—exactly the result that Pelosi, Hoyer and Conyers cynically
intended.

Now it is up to the public and the impeachment movement to call
their bluff and take impeachment to the next level. Noting that even
Rep. Conyers ended the hearing by saying, “We are not done yet, and we
do not intend to go away until we achieve the accountability that
Congress is entitled to and that the American people deserve,” Rep.
Kucinich and five other co-sponsors of his articles of impeachment
(Robert Wexler, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Maurice Hinchey, Sheila
Jackson-Lee, and Hank Johnson) are calling on all Americans to contact
their representatives (202-224-3121) and urge them to join in
co-sponsoring those articles and in calling for a formal impeachment
hearing.

They are also calling on everyone to contact their local and
national media, nearly all of whom have blacked out news of
impeachment. Incredibly, the New York Times, for example, has not even
reported on Friday’s hearing, even as a news “brief.” Those news
organizations, like the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer,
that did report on the hearings did so only in short, inside articles.
Though the hearing was aired in full on C-Span (and is still available for download), many Americans don’t even know it happened.

Time is short, but even at this late date, it would be a simple
matter to impeach the president on some issues. As several of Friday’s
witnesses pointed out, President Bush has essentially dared Congress to
act, admitting that he openly violated the FISA law—a felony, and
openly admitting that he has refused to enact laws passed by the
Congress, claiming a power—unitary executive authority—not even
mentioned in the Constitution. He has openly admitted to having known
about, and approved, “enhanced interrogation techniques” devised by his
subordinates—techniques like waterboarding which clearly violate the
Geneva Conventions and US law. No hearings would be required to
establish these high crimes and misdemeanors. They could simply be
voted on by an Impeachment Committee and sent to the full House for a
vote.

Even if there were no time for a Senate trial, the simple act of
impeaching the president for one or more abuses of power would serve
notice on future presidents that future such abuses would not be
tolerated. Failure to do so, and allowing this administration to leave
office unimpeached, would send the opposite message: that Congress is
no longer a co-equal branch of government, but is merely a consultative
body, at best, and that a president is in effect a dictator.

That Pelosi buckled and permitted a hearing on impeachable crimes
by the Bush/Cheney administration is a major victory for the
impeachment movement, but it must not be the end of the line.
Impeachment activists need to now redouble their efforts to make
Congress do its Constitutional duty, and initiate a formal impeachment
proceeding.

As former Republican representative Bob Barr, now the Libertarian
candidate for president, told Friday’s hearing, “We had a nuclear clock
during the Cold War. In the ‘90s we had a debt clock. Now we have a
Constitution Clock.”

That clock is getting close to midnight, and it is ticking.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net