Impeach Bush?
Ralph Nader says that Rep. John Conyers is going to be filing a request for impeachment. Is the Impeach Bush movement gathering steam?
by Jonathan V. Last
02/27/2004 12:00:00 AM
Page 2 of 2 < Back
Last August in the tiny northern California town of Arcata, town councilman Dave Meserve found a way around the Cheney problem by proposing a resolution calling for the impeachment of both the president and vice president. After months of deliberation, the council compromised with Meserve by sending a letter to Congress asking them to look into the president's conduct during the Iraq war. The Santa Cruz city council took similar action in September.
Standing firmly against this sort of lily-livered compromise are the two chief engines of the impeachment movement: Francis Boyle's Impeach-Bush-Now.org and Ramsey Clark's VoteToImpeach.org.
PROFESSOR FRANCIS A. BOYLE teaches international law at the University of Illinois and is something of an impeachment regular. "This is Boyle's second impeachment campaign," his website bio says proudly, "the first of which took place in 1991 when he co-authored the resolution to impeach George H.W. Bush . . ."
Boyle's operation is small and, truth be told, one gets the sense that it might be motivated not entirely out of political, or even ideological, principle. Impeach-Bush-Now.org is littered with links to Boyle's legal writings, links to Real Audio files of Boyle's interviews, and lots and lots of contact info for the professor. Sample letters Boyle provides for voters to send to their elected representatives, say things such as, "International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle . . . is willing to help any member of Congress draft articles of impeachment free of charge" and
"I recommend you contact Professor Boyle." In his bio, Boyle notes that he's been on "The O'Reilly Factor."
In contrast, Ramsey Clark's VoteToImpeach.org is a serious operation. The site claims that over 383,000 people have voted in their "referendum" to impeach the president. They have a large print ad which ran in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. And they have tchotchkes!
BUT IF YOU WANT more than T-shirts and bumper stickers, you'll need to visit ImpeachCentral.com for your free impeachment kit. A spin-off of Democrats.com, ImpeachCentral takes a Deaniac approach to the impeachment battle, waging the fight with MeetUps and Martin Luther King quotes. What is interesting is that its sister site, Democrats.com, was founded by David Lytel and Bob Fertig and has an advisory board made up of the kind of people--such as Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, Gore advisor Greg Simon, and Jared Shutz, the cofounder of BlueMountainArts.com--who would normally be uncomfortable rubbing elbows with Ramsey Clark.
Not that they should be held responsible for the site's impeachment drive, mind you. Democrats.com has this nifty disclaimer:
Note to right wing conspiracy theorists: Democrats.com Advisory Board members provide occasional advice upon request from the founders--just like asking a wise relative for advice. Naturally, if one ignores such advice when sought, or fails to seek it in the first place, those individuals are not responsible for your actions. Except for writing articles under their names, these individuals are not involved in, or responsible for, the editorial content of this site. Nor are any of their present or past associates or employers, including President Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
Who knows how much trouble Webster Hubbell could have saved himself back in '93 if his all-white country club had carried a similar disclaimer for its members.
FOR DEMOCRATS, impeachment is a case of good news/bad news. The bad news is that impeachment isn't likely to progress past the angry petition stage. The good news is that the landscape would seem to suggest that Ralph Nader isn't positioning himself to peel off votes from either John Kerry or John Edwards. Lyndon LaRouche, however, should watch his left flank.
Jonathan V. Last in online editor of The Weekly Standard. |
