Impeach Dubya

Over the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, my daughter caught a rotavirus or something. There was a lot of throwing up. I spent my time taking care of her and doing urgent loads of laundry. (There is something nasty going around New York City day cares – the little girl who lives two floors below us was sick with the same bug).

As a result, I missed a lot of stuff. I missed coverage of our bungled attempt to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri and collateral killing of innocent Pakistanis.

While it’s certainly a good idea to be going after al Qeada wherever they’re hiding (including Pakistan), it looks like another instance in a long series where we’ve been let down by the intelligence-gathering mistakes of the CIA. The result: more Pakistanis hate our guts. Can’t we put some eyes on the ground over there, three years after 9/11, or are we going to stay dependant on Predator drone videos and NSA spying upon Americans for our battlefield intelligence?

Speaking of illegal NSA spying, I also missed Al Gore’s speech on Bush’s illegal wiretapping of Americans without search warrants. But the transcript has great stuff:

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that "the law is king."

I wish Gore had talked like this back in 2000. He would have kicked Dubya's ass. Oh, wait a minute. He did!

Besides impeaching Bush, shouldn’t we simply do away with the entire NSA at this point? The agency proved itself useless prior to the 9/11 attacks and clearly cannot help itself from violating Americans' civil rights, whether in the 1970s or 2000s. The functions of this spying agency should be broken up and spread among other intelligence agencies more capable of operating within the limits of the law.

I was heartened to find most Americans think Bush deserves impeachment if he approved illegal wiretaps. By 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new Zogby poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org.

52% agreed with the statement: "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment." 43% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer.

I say: let’s impeach Dubya.