EDITORIALS REGARDING IMPEACHMENT OF BUSH
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By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on July 10, 2006, Printed on December 30, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/38604/
The extent to which American exceptionalism is embedded in the national psyche is
awesome to behold.
While the United States is a country like any other, its citizens no more special than any
others on the planet, Americans still react with surprise at the suggestion that their country
could be held responsible for something as heinous as a war crime.
From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack
ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn't
feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis -- most
certainly not.
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Pelosi and Conyers-- Smarter than Impeachment
By Rob Kall
A lot of people are angry with Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers because they
say impeachment is not on the table. I say "thank goodness."
You see, I'm in a hurry. I want to see the big cleanup in Washington happen
much faster-- including showing Cheney and Bush the door, and maybe, the
prison yard. Pelosi and Conyers are doing things exactly right and they have a
better chance of my goal-- removal of Bush and Cheney from office-- than if
they were going the impeachment route.
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03/16/2006 @ 11:55 am
Filed by RAW STORY
32 members of Congress have signed on to a resolution calling for a committee to probe
grounds for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, Atlanta Progressive News reports.
The committee would seek to determine whether or not Bush committed impeachable offenses
in leading the United States into war with Iraq.
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Poll: Americans Slightly Favor Plan to Censure
A new poll finds that a plurality of Americans favor plans to censure President George W. Bush,
while a surprising 42% favor moves to actually impeach the President.
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Ruth Conniff on the Impeachment Buzz
By Ruth Conniff
February 2006 Issue
Why is it that Republicans, somberly intoning about the "rule of law," could muster
the political will to impeach a President over a semen-stained dress, but impeachment
based on misleading the country into war and illegal wiretapping is beyond the pale?
Were Clinton's lies about his affair with a White House intern of graver national significance?
Were the legal grounds for impeachment more solid? Of course not.
But the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the Bush Administration is
impervious to an impeachment drive. Americans, stunned and frightened into submission
after 9/11, have been willing to accept civil liberties infringements in the Patriot Act in
exchange for a greater sense of security. The transparently fabricated connection between
9/11 and the Iraq invasion sold, too. And Democrats don't want to look like wing nuts or
conspiracy theorists or "soft on terror," so no one has been willing to draft articles of impeachment.
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Jack Cafferty on the administration: Just Do it!
Jack spelled out all the abuses that have been conducted by this administration
since it took over office in about one minute.
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Clowntime is Over: The Last Stand of the American Republic
Chris Floyd --Wednesday, 28 December 2005
So now, at last, the crisis is upon us. Now the cards are finally on the table, laid out so
starkly that even the Big Media sycophants and Beltway bootlickers can no longer ignore
them. Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you
hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?
There is no third way here, no other option, no wiggle room, no ambiguity. The much-belated
exposure of George W. Bush's warrantless spy program has forced the Bush-Cheney Regime
to openly declare what they have long implied -- and enacted -- in secret: that the president
is above the law, a military autocrat with unlimited powers, beyond the restraint or
supervision of any other institution or branch of government. Outed as rank deceivers,
perverters of the law and rapists of the Constitution, the Bush gang has decided that their best
defense -- their only defense, really -- is a belligerent offense. "Yeah, we broke the law," they
now say; "so what? We'll break it again whenever we want to, because law don't stick to
our Big Boss Man. What are you going to do about it, chump?"
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Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'
By DOUG THOMPSON
Dec 9, 2005, 07:53
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet
with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the
9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties
Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to
oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the
act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to
nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief.
Do it my way.”
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William Hughes: 'Is George Bush a mad emperor?'
Posted on Friday, December 23 @ 10:14:44 EST
William Hughes, Media Monitors Network
"Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error."
-- Cicero [1]
The Roman masses finally figured out that their highly eccentric Emperor, Caligula,
was a raving lunatic when it was revealed that he was having lavish dinner parties in
honor of his favorite horse and that he had even considered making it a Consul!
Recently, President George W. Bush, a/k/a "Bush II," --a would be "Emperor," if there
ever was one--was forced to own up to the shocking fact that in Oct., 2001, he had covertly
ordered the National Security Agency (NSA), to spy on countless U.S. residents. Is Bush,
too, losing his mind? Coming on top of his damnable lies that got the U.S. into the Iraqi War,
this is another very disturbing bombshell. [4] Bush has been spying on our citizenry without
the required court orders and in direct violation of the liberties guaranteed in the U.S.
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and in other laws of the land. Question: Is Bush's acting
contemptuously, and above the law, in this latest disgusting scandal, going to be a tipping
point for the American people? When are they going to stop putting up with his crazed
antics? Will this repulsive episode be, like Caligula's "horse thing?" Well, I sure hope so!
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The Miscreant Dynasty
The Bush Generations Have Enriched Themselves While
Impoverishing the Presidency
At this point, the policy legacy of George Bush seems pretty well defined by three
disparate disasters: Iraq in foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, corporate influence
over tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political consequence, we may
avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White House. But what the Bush dynasty has done
to presidential campaign science — the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in
the modern era — amounts to a political legacy that can haunt the Republic for years to come.
We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken the playbook of the
"ruthless" Kennedys and amplified it into a consistent code of amorality in both campaign
tactics and governance. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money, image-manipulation,
old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal attacks on worthy adversaries such as
Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge
and purpose undergirding John Kennedy's sophisticated internationalism, his Medicare initiative,
his late-blooming devotion to racial justice, and Robert Kennedy's opposition to corporate and
union gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and, yes, even Lincoln, two generations of Kennedys
believed that a certain amount of political chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.
Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers devoted first to using political
networks to pile up and protect personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to
gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are what passes in American for
hereditary aristocrats. In sum, George Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose
history and social significance that, given his animosity to scholarly thought, he almost certainly
does not understand.
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President Bush has admitted that he has authorized the use of surveillance
upon American citizens and residents. He has argued that he has the authority
to do so, that he has balanced the need to spy on us and our civil liberties.
Unfortunately, his claims do not withstand scrutiny.
Firstly, the spying upon Americans without probable cause, due process and a
warrant supported by evidence and sworn before a competent magistrate violates
the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th and 14th Amendments of the US Constitution. It is essential
to the argument to understand that the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights does
not create the rights of citizens, but places our government in the position of
GUARANTEEING these inherent and INALIENABLE rights. Infringing upon
these rights in any manner is unlawful, unconstitutional, immoral and evil.
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'The president must be held accountable. Period.'
Posted on Tuesday, December 20 @ 10:09:48 EST
Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - A couple of weeks ago, Doug Thompson, the proprietor of the
political news Web site Capital Hill Blue, reported that President Bush referred to the
Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper."
This remark came during a November meeting with Republican Congressional leaders
about renewal of the Patriot Act. They were trying to tell the president that some of his
conservative supporter are still upset over what they believe is an overreach of federal power.
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush allegedly retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief.
Do it my way. ... Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper."
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Senator Robert C. Byrd: 'No president is above the law'
Posted on Wednesday, December 21 @ 09:54:52 EST
Senator Robert C. Byrd
Remarks by US Senator Robert C. Byrd as delivered on the Senate floor.
Americans have been stunned at the recent news of the abuses of power by an overzealous
President. It has become apparent that this Administration has engaged in a consistent and
unrelenting pattern of abuse against our Country's law-abiding citizens, and against our Constitution.
We have been stunned to hear reports about the Pentagon gathering information and creating
databases to spy on ordinary Americans whose only sin is choose to exercise their First Amendment
right to peaceably assemble. Those Americans who choose to question the Administration's
flawed policy in Iraq are labeled by this Administration as "domestic terrorists."
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'Brand X'
Posted on Tuesday, December 06 @ 10:21:47 EST
Larry Beinhart, The Huffington Post
If we know anything from the 2004 election, we know that branding is as
essential to politics as it is to selling detergents, cars and perfume.
The Bush campaign branded Kerry as a flip-flopper and soft on terror. Kerry
failed to brand Bush as anything. And the chicken-hawk defeated the war hero.
Democrats and liberals have still failed to brand Bush and the Republicans as
anything in particular. Here are some suggestions.
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GOP Woes Don't End with DeLay
Posted on Sunday, January 08 @ 09:48:10 EST
Jennifer Loven, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Republicans worried about their party's future have succeeded
in pushing embattled former Majority Leader Tom DeLay off the stage. Even so, the
Republicans' election-year troubles are far from over.
Need a reminder?
President Bush, the titular head of the GOP, is waging an unpopular war in Iraq and
presiding over a nation with lingering economic anxieties. He suffers from approval
ratings around 40 percent - near record lows for his presidency. Questionable stock
transactions by the top Republican in the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist of
Tennessee, are under investigation. A special prosecutor's probe continues into
whether Bush administration officials outed a CIA operative in retribution for her
husband's Iraq war criticism. A secret anti-terror program that Bush approved to
eavesdrop on people inside the United States without warrants is raising concerns
about overly broad presidential powers.
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'Impeach the Veep?'
Michael Winship
Cheney has controlled the reins more tightly and secretively than any vice president
in history, to the extent that, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity,
he and his staff have even "been exempting themselves from long-standing travel
disclosure rules followed by the rest of the executive branch... As a result... the public
is kept largely unaware of where he and his staff are traveling, with whom they are
meeting and how much it costs, even though tax dollars are covering the bill."
Within Cheney's penchant for secrecy are suggestions of abuses of power far beyond
the all-too-familiar accusations of finagling billions of dollars' worth of contracts for his
old pals at Halliburton.
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Posted by IWTnews Staff on Nov 30, 5:10pm.
The Sunday Herald's Iain Macwhirter fears that the public, with the help
of indifferent media, is "developing a kind of 'atrocity fatigue' over Iraq... We
can’t allow boredom to dull our moral sensibilities to what is beginning to
look like the crime of the century." An example of the commentary we will
feature on IWTnews Nightly.
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Bill Moyers
November 18, 2005
Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host of the PBS program
NOW With Bill Moyers. He made these remarks at a celebration marking the
50th anniversary of the independent newspaper The Texas Observer . Moyers
is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the author
of Moyers on America, the recent paperback collection of his speeches and essays.
Everything President George W. Bush knows, he learned here, as the product of a
system rigged to assure the political progeny needed to perpetuate itself with minimum
interference from the nuisances of liberal democracy. You remember liberal democracy:
the rule of law, the protection of individual and minority rights, checks and balances
against arbitrary power, an independent press, the separation of church and state. As
governor, Bush was nurtured by the peculiar Texas blend of piety and privilege that
mocks those values. With the election of 2000, he and his cohorts arrived in Washington
like atheists taking over the Vatican; they had come to run a government they don’t believe in.
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Another Set of Scare Tactics
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Mr. President, it won't work this time.
With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent of Americans
agreeing that George W. Bush "deliberately misled people to make the case for
war with Iraq," the president clearly needs to tend to his credibility problems.
But his partisan attacks on the administration's critics, in a Veterans Day speech
last week and in Alaska yesterday, will only add to his troubles.
Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of
having "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" was giving
aid and comfort to the enemy.
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Bush lies again about his previous lies about Iraq
Eric Draper/White House
Bush celebrates Veterans Day by lying to a bunch of them yesterday in Pennsylvania.
George W. Bush, such a lightweight president that he doesn't even read, is accusing
others of rewriting history.
How would he know?
Bush's handlers, who still include that teetering humpty Karl Rove, propped up the
POTUS in front of a huge, Soviet-style "Strategy for Victory" slogan in Pennsylvania
yesterday and directed him to say the following:
The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is
too important, for politicians to throw out false charges.
And what would those be? I wonder. Bush said:
While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war,
it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.
Pause here for crowd applause. (You don't think Bush gave this speech just anywhere,
do you? He was speaking at the Tobyhanna Army Depot.) He continued:
Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the
intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.
They're right, and Bush is a liar.
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Geov Parrish: 'When presidents lie'
Posted on Tuesday, November 15 @ 09:52:41 EST
American public shouldn't be surprised by unraveling justification for war
Geov Parrish
Oh, what a tangled web we weave...
One by one, President Bush's lies are unraveling -- the lies that were used to justify
talk of mushroom clouds over America, the lies that led a majority of the country to
believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The yellowcake uranium in
Niger. The weapons stories peddled by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and by Ahmad Chalabi's
exile goons. The meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi operatives in Prague. The
aluminum tubes for processing uranium. All these are now known to be lies, cherry-picked
intelligence that had all been discredited and discarded by the CIA and State Department
before being seized upon as war rationales by the eager chickenhawks of the White House
Iraq Group.
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The American body politic laid low
Posted on Sunday, November 13 @ 08:36:51 EST
Washington (George) led the way in political rhetoric. Now Washington (DC) leads
the way in crises and scandals
Henry Porter
Watching Dick Cheney on US TV, I tried to remember a quote from George
Washington's farewell address in which he outlined all the dangers which might
encircle the new republic. So I looked up the speech and found myself captivated
by the beauty of the language and by Washington's wisdom and knowledge of human
nature. It is right to call it one of the great works of civilisation.
Language is the man. Washington's virtue, his learning, courage and experience shine
in every phrase of that address, just as President Bush's inadequacy is laid bare whenever
he tries to explain his policies. If a politician cannot write or speak fluently, you can bet
he or she is not thinking fluently, perhaps not even thinking at all.
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New headline: Bush Rips Critics
By dwyerj1,
Sat Nov 12th, 2005 at 02:03:25 AM EDT :: War on Terror
Predictably, Bush's Veterans Day appearance was with military backdrop and
thousands of filtered approve-of-Bush audience support. Predictably, Mr. Bush
attempted to denigrate those who have challenged him as unpatriotic, not
supporting, our troops, giving the enemy the signal that we are weak, rewriting
history. I'm his critic and I don't feel he ripped into me.
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Bush's approval ratings will not recover —
There will be no comeback'
Posted on Tuesday, November 08 @ 10:12:45 EST
By: Cenk Uygur:
I've already seen the so-called "narrative of comeback" being bandied about
in the mainstream media. They tell us that the story line is supposed to go:
1. Rise 2. Fall 3. Comeback. Now that George Bush has suffered the fall, the
media now gets busy writing the comeback. There are two problems with this.
First, this isn't a movie. The media is supposed to report what happens, not
write a pre-ordained script. We're in serious times; we need our reporters to
be serious people. Not a bunch of second-rate wannabe script writers. The
country isn't your amusement park. Do your job - report the facts!
Second, Bush isn't going to make a comeback. He's fallen and he can't get up.
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Failing upward: George W. Bush's Wall of Shame
Posted on Tuesday, November 08 @ 10:08:20 EST
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The motto of this administration might easily be: "failing upward." Of course,
that's not hard when those leading the country into catastrophe are also making
the appointments and bestowing the honors. Somewhere in this world of ours
there should be at least one Wall of Shame (and perhaps an adjoining Wall of
Cronyism) for an administration which has heaped favor, position, and honors
on those who have blundered, lied, manipulated, and broken the law (not to
say, cracked open the Constitution and the republic). Here is just a sampling
of the band of culprits who might appear on such a wall and but a few of the
things for which they might be held accountable:
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White House in Chaos and Other Utter Horseshit
Nothing could be more damaging for the bridge club of armchair politicians
known as the Democratic Leadership than the recent spate of sound bytes like
‘Bush’s worst week in Office,’ ‘A White House Demoralized,’ and ‘Bushies on
the Brink of Collapse’.
You can already feel Schumer, Dean, Hillary, and their media addicted minions
being taken over by that familiar self-satisfied stupor, validating their inaction and
cowardice, even repositioning it as though it was part of a grand plan, an agenda,
even an ideology.
It’s like a bunch of fat people on a couch learning about the obesity epidemic from
60 Minutes and concluding they must be skinny.
The problem with these snappy doomsday pronouncements—collective wishes really—is
that they bear no relationship to reality. You really have to wonder what kind of bloated
house-bound moron could think slumping polls and plummeting approval ratings would
worry a gang of fanatics who stole two elections in a row, invaded a country they knew
couldn’t defend itself, and gave a male hustler White House security clearance.
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'Faith and fraud: Bush's empire of lies'
Posted on Friday, November 04 @ 10:19:06 EST
Jonathan Schell, The Nation
A factitious picture of the world built up by the Bush Administration over its five
years in power is now going to pieces before our eyes. Great jagged spikes of reality,
like the crags of the iceberg that ripped open the staterooms of the Titanic, are tearing
into it on all sides. The disrespected world of facts, an exacting master, is putting down
this governmental insurrection against its ineluctable laws.
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Dear America
As a friend of the family I can't sit back and watch you do this to yourself
without saying something. Consider this a long distance intervention.
Your man is no good. He treats you like crap, lies to you, abuses you,
bullies you, exploits you, takes your money. As a friend I want to tell you
that you deserve better. You deserve a person that treats you with respect,
cares about your welfare, and your children's welfare, but that's not George
and it never will be.
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Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has
remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we
realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent,
but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all,
of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never
been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.
So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so.
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Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:
Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
By JOHN W. DEAN
----Friday, Jun. 06, 2003\
President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq , he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation.
Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they start another war.
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Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers
A Shel Silverstein cartoon of a few decades past depicts two prisoners, shackled to the wall of an ancient dungeon. One says to the other, “Now here is my plan.”
One must admire the prisoner’s indomitable will, however unrealistic. Fortunately, the present political situation in the United States is not hopeless, though one might think so to read some of the e-mail responses to our essays:
· "The fact of the matter is, the new Republican Party is in power, and it will take more than a majority of voters to dislodge them in 2006. If you own the system, you can rig it to give you the results you want."
· "I don't think the House of Bush will fall anytime soon. Corporate America has things just the way they want them and there's too many regular people drunk on Jaysus and fear. The Bush Administration has tapped into this perfectly."
· "I'm sorry to say so, but I believe resistance is futile. The communists kept the Soviet Union in an iron grip for almost a hundred years. No rebellion even came close to oust the commies and they were bumbling amateurs compared to the Bush camarilla."
Please understand, I am not an irrepressible Pollyanna – I am fully aware that we may be in the dusk before a long night of despotism. Like most visitors to the progressive internet websites, I too am tormented by anguish over what we have lost and by dread of still worse to follow. But nothing would be more beneficial to Bush, Rove, Cheney and the Busheviks than the surrender of their adversaries to despair and thence paralysis.
I am reminded of a slogan from World War II (revived by Paul Rogat Loeb): “The difficult can be done right away, the impossible will take a little longer.”
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America 's Immoral Majority
Date: Friday, September 30 @ 10:05:30 EDT
By Charles Cutter, Magic City Morning Star
Many pundits believe we are now seeing serious cracks in the Republican Party's monolithic control of our federal government. Many others feel this is
simply wishful thinking; to them, an electorate that has accepted everything
from Abu Ghraib and nonexistent WMDs in Iraq to the Patriot Act and tax
cuts for the ultra-wealthy at home...well, let's just say that it's hard to gauge
the public's threshold of tolerance. What will be the tipping point at which
a vast majority of Americans refuse to endorse the policies of Bush & Co.?
Does such a tipping point even exist?
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While the Iron is Hot
October 4, 2005
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers
The Republican Party and the Bush Administration are reeling, enmeshed in
corruption and failure, and the ideology of the regressive right is in retreat.
The iron is hot – now is the time to strike.
Unfortunately, it appears that the congressional Democrats and the Democratic
Party would prefer to throw cold water on the hot iron.
What in the name of God and the U.S. Constitution has neutered the Democrats?
Clearly, if the alleged "opposition party" won't lead, then we the people must do
so. Perhaps, out of this inchoate and widespread resistance, a movement will
coalesce and effective leadership will emerge. They must, if we are to rescue
ourselves and our republic from this morass.
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