Washington's Bloody Make-Believe

http://consortiumnews.com/2007/042607a.html

Washington's Bloody Make-Believe

By Carla Binion
April 26, 2007

Editor’s Note: It's taken years for Washington's insider crowd to grasp that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched the Iraq War based on lies and distortions. But the idea of demanding serious accountability still remains too hard to accept.

In this guest essay, journalist Carla Binion says it's time to finally bridge the gap between Washington's land of political make-believe and the bloody reality that it has caused:



It's astonishing that members of Congress are either unaware George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied the nation to war with Iraq, or they are aware of the fact and don't care. A Congress grounded in reality would have unequivocally acknowledged the administration's lies long ago and taken appropriate action - almost certainly impeachment.

If we say the pre-war lies don't matter and the country should sweep them under the rug and only focus on the best way out of Iraq, what we're really saying is that the truth itself doesn't matter.

If we say we should look away from the fact that thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died for a lie, we're saying the lost lives don't matter, the war-injured and maimed don't matter, America's honor and integrity don't matter.

The logic-free anti-impeachment excuse is that the nation can't handle running the country and impeachment simultaneously. John Nichols wrote in The Nation recently, (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/nichols) " Pelosi fears that impeachment would distract from the Democratic legislative agenda and provoke an electoral backlash."

However, the bottom line is, the country can't afford to let Bush and Cheney get away with deceiving us into a costly and bloody war. Decisions on a matter of this weight shouldn't be based on fear, whether fear of an impeded agenda or threat of backlash.

According to Nichols, such fears are unwarranted. He mentions the Watergate Congress was able to carry out a complex agenda in addition to conducting impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Nichols also points out that "Democrats had one of their best years ever at the polls after pressuring Nixon out of office."

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run the country. Unlike Today's Dems. Just goes to prove Congress was smarter back then. Otherwise we'd never have gone into Iraq in the first place, with at least half the Puggies siding with all the Dems against the IWR in 2002.

The only guy other than Clinton that was impeached was Andrew Johnson and he like Clinton was not convicted. The impeachment of Clinton did not help the Republicans and IMO failing to convict Bush would end up surely as a failed exercise in futility.