The Washington Post Is at It Again By Ed Martin

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ed_marti_070520_the_washington_post_.htm


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May 21, 2007

The Washington Post Is at It Again

By Ed Martin


The Washington Post published David Broder's column and an article about Newt Gingrich that exposes Broder's and Gingrich's classic loyal Bushie tactics of ignoring the Constitution, misstatement of facts and distortion of the truth.

Broder writes: "While the American president cannot be forced out of office against his will,"

Well, let's see about that. The Constitution, Article ll, Section 4: 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.

Contrary to Broder, the Constitution does provide for the removal of the president against his will.

In an article about Newt Gingrich's fawning praise of Jerry Falwell, Gingrich ranted against things secular, revealing his ignorance of what secular means....

Fortunately, Broder and Gingrich are irrevocably wrong. If we followed Broder's reasoning that the president can't be removed against his will, George Bush, The Great Decider, could decide that he is President for Life. And if we accept Gingrich's reasoning that the secular must be eliminated and everything shoud be only all his religion, all the time, the United States would grind to a catastrophic halt while everyone stayed home and practiced only Gingrich's religion with no power, no lights, no water, no TV, no internet, no newspapers, no transportation, no police, no government, in ignorance, while slowly starving to death.





Authors Bio: Ed Martin is an unindicted curmudgeon. He is not a Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, deist, atheist, or a member of any -ism.

is a pathetic he-whore who's found an audience, AGAIN.

In the insular world of the beltway, impeachment has been banished from the realm of the possible.

Broder's bizarre assertion is not alone. I can't count the number of times I've yelled "WTF" at the TV when some pol or pundit says something like "the only thing Congress can do is cut the funds." Their rhetoric makes it clear that the option of impeachment has literally been banned from their thoughts.

We are beginning to hear DC insiders describe intolerable, unconstitutional, and Un-American acts committed by this WH. The ONLY rational response to the enormity of the violations is to impeach. As long as impeachment is "off the table." it will continue to be literally "unthinkable." If they allow the possibility into their thoughts for too long, they cannot escape the irrationality of their refusal to impeach. Banishing impeachment from their thoughts allows them to hold onto their belief that they are rational beings. (The emperor must be wearing clothes. If he is naked, everybody around me is nuts.)

The thing about group think is that it can only hold up as long as the group's defenses against reality effectively keep reality at bay. There are signs that those defenses are breaking down. If the reality we've been shouting at them (figuratively and literally) in finally getting through, we could see impeachment become a reality with amazing speed.

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Characteristics of "group think" include:

• Overestimation of the Group
  Illusion of invulnerability, Belief in the Inherent Morality of the Group


• Closed-Mindedness
  Collective Rationalizations and Stereotypes of Outgroups


• Pressures toward Uniformity
  Self-censorship, Illusion of Unanimity, Direct Pressure on Dissenters, Self-Appointed "mindguards"

General factors that led group members astray:

• Diffusion of Individual Responsibility:
  When we’re alone, we realize that either we respond to an event, or no one does. If others are around, we are more likely to defer; there are costs to intervening, and we can avoid those costs if others choose to intervene.


• Status Quo Bias:
  We have an exaggerated preference for the status quo, and if there is no status quo, we opt for the default choice.


• Informational Conformity:
  We learn about an element of physical or social reality by observing other people’s reactions to it, often without even realizing it.

Sources: http://web.mit.edu/16.459/www/Teams2.pdf and http://www.wws.princeton.edu/wwac/files/psych_3.doc