Happy Days, Here Again?

It was like the good old days, as former Gov. Howard Dean sat down for about 40 minutes Wednesday morning with a table full of veteran Vermont reporters in the back room at Democrat Campaign HQ on the Burlington Waterfront.  Ross Sneyd (AP) and Darren Allen (Rutland Herald/Times Argus) drove in from Montpeculiar. John Dillon (VPR), Sam Hemingway (Freeps) and Stew Ledbetter (WPTZ-TV) also attended and fired questions at the national star.

Surprisingly, the biggest local TV news station, WGOP, er, WCAX-TV, aka “Vermont’s Own,” did not make it. Well, maybe not too surprising, eh?

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee (a born-and-raised Goldwater Republican, let’s not forget), told the gang that if next Tuesday’s election were held today, his party - the Democratic Party - would win back a majority in the House and the vote in the Senate would be a tie, as of today.

Chairman Dean said he’s feeling “optimistic.” He said “People want change and they’re going to get change.”

Ho-Ho also looked into his 2007 crystal ball and predicted a raise in the minimum wage, an interest rollback on college loans, a middle-class tax cut and NO tax cuts for oil companies with Democrats in power on Capitol Hill. 

Dean also promised, “There will be no vindictiveness.”

Though he compared Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the Nixon-Agnew administration of the Vietnam War era (1969-74), Americans, said Dean, will not see what he called,  “extensive impeachment hearings” of President George W. Bush. Rather, he said, we need to concentrate on bringing the country back together. Said Ho-Ho:

“The worst thing George Bush has done to this country is not the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina. It’s not the huge deficits - all of which are really bad. The worst thing this president has done is divide us bitterly and I think what the American people want is for us to be put back together again and given hope. You can’t do that if you’re spending all your time trying to impeach the president.”

Besides, added Howard:

“There is a practical consideration. Should you impeach the president, you end up with Dick Cheney. How’d you like those apples?”

Good point, eh?

Comments

[clark]

Right! That's why I've always said we need to impeach Cheney first!!

[Jodin]

He's retarted.

Initiating the impeachment process would lead to an investigation that would implicate lots of people in the Bush administration who are guilty of committing crimes, including Cheney.

Waiting until he leaves office will also leave us complicit in any further crimes Bush commits. The Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated that the death toll from a "tactical" nuclear weapon of the kind Bush is contemplating using in Iran would be at minimum 3 million men, women, and children. The path of death would stretch across country boundaries into India.
-----------------------------
Do-It-Yourself Impeachment, no joke.
The Citizens' movement.

The day the nation demands impeachment is almost upon us. On Jan 3rd, sacks and sacks of mail will be sent to congress demanding impeachment via the House of Representative's own rules. This legal document is as binding as if a State or if the House itself passed the impeachment resolution (H.R. 635).

There's a little known and rarely used clause of the "Jefferson Manual" in the rules for the House of Representatives which sets forth the various ways in which a president can be impeached. Only the House Judiciary Committee puts together the Articles of Impeachment, but before that happens, someone has to initiate the process.

That's where we come in. In addition to the State-by-State method, one of the ways to get impeachment going is for individual citizens like you and me to submit a memorial. ImpeachforPeace.org, part of the movement to impeach the president, has created a new memorial based on one which was successful in impeaching a federal official in the past. You can find it on their website as a PDF.

STOP WAITING FOR YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO ACT FOR YOU.

You can initiate the impeachment process yourself by downloading the memorial, filling in the relevant information in the blanks (your name, state, etc.), and sending it in. Be a part of history.

http://ImpeachForPeace.org/ImpeachNow.html

[JayV]

Reading this thread late, I know. But there's a good piece by Joshua Frank in Counterpunch.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has promised there will not be a change of course in Iraq if the Democrats take back Congress. Potential House leader Nancy Pelosi has assured voters that impeachment is not in the cards for Bush, either. Yet the liberal establishment is beaconing antiwar voters to clamor for the Democratic Party next Tuesday. It seems like 2004 all over again.

I recently disparaged the positions of progressive media critic Jeff Cohen and The Nation magazine for not supporting independent antiwar candidates, and instead calling for more of the same: i.e. voting for the Democrats even though we disagree with them on the war and a host of other issues. If we want to take on Bush, they argue, the Democrats have to take back Congress, and only then can we start to build a genuine progressive movement.

In the meantime, however, the war will rage on and Bush will remain at the helm of Empire with Congress's blessing. As the Washington Post reported on August 27, of the 46 candidates in tight House races this year, 29 oppose a timetable for troop withdraw. That's a whopping 63% of Democrats in hotly contested races who have exactly the same position on the war as our liar-in-chief, George W. Bush.

However, the more theoretical among these liberal careerists have a popular front philosophy: where they align with the liberal bourgeoisie against the reactionary capitalists. But when push comes to shove the liberals of the ruling elite always prefer repression to democracy -- something ol' Karl Marx recognized during the 1848 democratic revolutions in Europe and the Left in the US should have recognized when the industrial wing of the Republican Party sabotaged Radical Reconstruction last century.

But that may be a bit too analytical for such an obvious crisis: the Democrats and their patrons are part of the problem, not the solution.