Repudiating Evil

Last night in an interview with Keith Olbermann on Countdown Rachel Madow made the, to me, rather odd comment that “the purpose of impeachment is to save the office.” Ms. Madow is a charming person and an outstandingly clear speaker. I’m on the same point of view as she is pretty much most of the time.

I had to ponder that for a while, though, to figure out what “saving the office” might mean. I imagine that what she meant but didn’t have time to say was that impeachment is the proper response to a person tarnishing the office and that such action would restore the honor and dignity of that office.

Fair enough, but to me a higher purpose of impeachment is to repudiate the action upon which the impeachment is based; to announce to the world and to our own population that “this country does not countenance that behavior by our government.”

I believe it to be supremely important the we as a nation tell the world that George W. Bush does not represent who we are. And, to our everlasting shame and detriment, we are not going to do that. We can no longer vote him out of office and, thanks to a supine Congress, we will not impeach him as our founding fathers designed for us to do when a president disgraced his office.

Nancy Pelosi swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution and then she announced to the world, and more importantly to the president, that her oath was meaningless when she said that one clause of the constitution she would not uphold; that “impeachment is off the table.”

That statement, a violation of her oath of office, was a political calculation to secure her rise to power. Rather than raising her to greater power, it should have been just cause to remove her from the office she held at the time. But such is the degree of corruption that our government has descended to that it achieved its calculated effect.

It also turned an abusive president loose to engage in even more blatantly open dishonesty, abuse of “executive privilege” and secrecy, and thuggish foreign policy, secure in the knowledge that he could not, would not be called to account.

And so George W. Bush will complete his term and retire to his sybaritic life of retirement, building a library as a monument to his own self image. And a country will be forever tarnished and shamed by his term in office, having failed to stop his crimes.

Congress didn’t have the will, and we were just too busy shopping.

Titles, and Titles

George Bush is so in love with his title of “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” (the title conferred by Article 2, Section 2 of our constitution) that he uses it in almost every address he makes to the nation, usually several times and always in its abbreviated form as simply “Commander in Chief.”

He has beaten on that drum so often that he has persuaded even newscasters who are highly critical of him, such as Keith Olbermann, to refer to him by that erroneous title. Olbermann should know better.

George Bush is not this nation’s Commander in Chief.

He is the nation’s Chief Executive, if you like, or its President.

He is Commander in Chief of the nation’s military.

He is not our Commander in Chief, and the distinction is not trivial.

The term “public servant” has lost favor because those in Washington do not want to think of themselves using that term. They want to think of themselves as being “in power” and they use that term freely. But the intent of our form of government is that officials are elected to serve the people of this country, not to rule them.

Our president is elected to serve the people of the country, not to command them. He commands the military forces. By taking their oath to serve in the military, soldiers agree to obey the chain of command up to and including the Commander in Chief. Such obedience is proper and necessary for the conduct of the military.

An ordinary citizen has not and need not take any such oath. The expectation of that kind of obedience from an ordinary citizen would be an abomination. This nation cast off the “divine right of kings” with its obligation of citizens to obey. As a private citizen, no one "commands" me.

Our military forces have a Commander in Chief.

Our nation is led by a public servant.

Grace Under Fire

As those of you who read my blog regularly know, I am no fan of the Bush family. Nonetheless, I was quite taken with Jenna Bush when I saw her interview by Diane Sawyer for ABC News. She came off as quite a charming person. Her answers to questions seemed to be made with a degree of thoughtfulness, honesty and forthrightness that is somewhat unusual in today’s public persons.

In response to Matt Damon’s discussion that President Bush’s children should be fighting in Iraq, she said “I understand the point of the statement” and that “I believe I serve by teaching” and serving in UNICEF.

When asked about the war in Iraq she replied, “I talk about it with my friends, I’m just not going to talk about it on national tv.” To me, that was a very nice answer, and it was delivered tactfully and respectfully.

I wish the parents had as much depth as the child.

Duplicitous Delusion

Full disclosure: a significant purpose of this post is merely to be able to use the title.

Bush is fulminating furiously over Congress shelving the Defense Authorization Bill. It contains a pay raise for the military so them shelving
it will deny a much needed raise to his much beloved troops. Before they shelved it, however, he said he was going to veto it. Why was he going to veto it? You got it; because the military pay raise was too much.

So when Congress wanted the bill to pass he was going to veto it. Now that the aren't passing it, same bill, he's castigating them for not passing it.

And we are supposed to listen to this boob?

Delusional Dishonesty

There is, of course, a lot of talk about the standoff between Bush and Congress about “funding the troops” and the latest supplemental funding bill. As usual, Bush is providing pretty much all of the inflammatory rhetoric, saying several times, for instance,

“The bottom line is this: Congress's failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated.”

This is an arrant lie of the most base political variety, and the falsity lies in two fronts; one which I can (reluctantly) tolerate and one which I cannot.

First, as has been pointed out many times, Congress has funded the troops. They have passed a bill providing every single dollar that Bush asked for. It is Bush that is denying funding to the troops by vetoing the bill.

It can be, and is, argued that the failure is that of Congress because they have included provisions in the bill that Bush cannot in good conscience allow to become law – provisions setting a timeline for withdrawal. I am on the side of withdrawal, but I do not deny Bush has a right to argue against those provisions. I would even go so far as to condone his rhetoric about “Congress not funding the troops” by including provisions which his principles require him to veto. (Not that I agree with him.)

From that standpoint his blather about this supplemental is more inflammatory than I would like to hear coming from the office of President of the United States, but I have no great problem with it. This part, though, really bothers me,

“…some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated.”

Those things are happening, but they have nothing whatever to do with passage or lack of passage of the supplemental funding bill. They are the direct result of decisions made by President Bush, and by him alone.
A decision to continue, and to expand, a failed war. A decision to fire the generals who opposed that expansion, and to promote and install new generals who would agree with him.

Military leaders warned Congress more than a year ago that our Army and Marine forces were near breaking point. Congress has been trying to bring them back from the brink of disaster and Bush has been putting more and more pressure and burden on them. We are now sending brigades back for a new tour of duty after only seven months “dwell time.” Combat tours are being extended by as much as a third on a regular basis, and consideration is being given to making the standard combat tour fifteen months rather than the present twelve months.

Recruiting is becoming more and more of a problem. "We're enlisting more dropouts, people with more law violations, lower test scores, more moral issues," said a senior noncommissioned officer involved in Army personnel and recruiting. "We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get people to join."

People in the National Guard enlisted with the understanding that they would be used for one combat tour of one year and then not used again for five years. We are breaking that promise by extending their tours in length, multiple times, and now by calling them up for a second tour after only two years. It isn’t that they don’t want to serve, they enlisted to do so, but we are requiring them to break promises they made to their employers and the consequences to their careers are often disastrous. Despite laws to the contrary, many of them lose promotions, are demoted, and even lose their jobs altogether.

These are terrible costs to the military, full-time and guard. They are not the result of any action of Congress. Congress is trying to reduce this carnage. These costs are the results of decisions made by George W. Bush.

For him to try to pass that buck to Congress is utterly despicable.