AlterNet: All the President’s Confessions — A good, albeit biased, essay from Pascal Zachary. Asks the question: why is Bush confessing to being a law-breaker?
Bush’s advocacy of lawlessness lies at the heart of the right-wing agenda to remake America.
Bush’s statement last Saturday that he ordered domestic spying, knowing it was possibly against the law to do so, was an astonishing confession in the annals of American history — and the defining moment of Bush’s tortured presidency. Why, after all, would the president open himself to the possibility, however remote, of an impeachment proceeding?
If American presidents stand for anything, it is deniability. This is the prime directive of presidential authority
The reason why he’s coming clean now is that the GOP will never allow him to be impeached, and if the Democrats manage to swing the majority back to their side after a failed impeachment attempt, then he would have to sodomize, kill and the eat the flesh of a Katrina victim on the white house lawn on live national television before they could oust him.
It’s all the same “tactical failure” bullshit.
Interesting thoughts from above essey: “It is easily forgotten, now that the right-wing has controlled Washington for a decade, that right-wing tactics were nearly all borrowed from the highly successful tactics of left-liberals in the 1960s and early ’70s. The prime method of the civil-rights movement, after all, was disobedience: unjust laws were to be disregarded. In the 1980s, the anti-abortion right, and especially its violent wing, embraced the notion that violent actions were justified to break laws they considered unjust.
The militia movement, which led to the Oklahoma City bombing 10 years ago, also justified illegal actions on the grounds of a “higher” law. More recently, the attacks on federal courts (and the judges themselves) by Tom DeLay and other right-wingers are expressions of the new conventional wisdom that there is a higher law than the law of the land, and that law is the right-wing agenda.”
Dems would never impeach Bush. Then you have Cheaney as an incumbant and that much tougher to beat.
That’s why Clinton wasn’t impeached. If Gore were president, he would have been tougher to beat.
Incognito, Clinton was impeached, but he was found not guilty.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/bc42.html
Bush isn’t admitting guilt at all, at least not in his twisted mind. He thinks he is “King of Amuericah”, and therefore there is nothing he can do that he (any any true Republican) would consider a crime. Sort of like the biblical maxim that says “God cannot sin”. This is the logic behind statements from Dick that say Bush didn’t break any laws when he quite clearly did…they are just laws he is immune to.
It sounds crazy, but unless he is impeached, and removed from office, then in the end these fuckers were right; he is above the law, and what sounds to some like “coming clean” is really just the mainstreaming of Nixon level crime to expedite us not caring anymore.
I believe Bush has committed impeachable offenses. I would dearly love to see him impeached. But, it will never happen. And it will be a good thing that it doesn’t happen.
After Clinton was impeached for such a phony charge, if Bush is impeached, then it will appear to many Republicans as payback. The next President, who most likely will be a Democrat, would then face the same charges for anything the Republicans thought could even the score. It would be a degeneration of the Presidency, most likely paralyzing the whole Federal Government. After Bush is gone, it will take a strong President to clean up the mess, we could not afford to have the Presidency crippled during that time.
The next President will have to address out massive trade imbalance, the inconceivable national debt, horrendous foreign relations, out of control military spending, 20 million illegal immigrants, fuel hogging vehicles sucking down imported oil, the war in Iraq, the new war in Iran and North Korea, Medicare inequities, the uninsured health care issue, the insured health care issue, and Social Security. The next President will need to heal the rift between the left and right and bring us together. He can not be distracted by partisan bullshit.
This administration will go down as one of the worst in history. Buchanan, Grant, and Arthur move over, there’s a new imbecile for your ranks.