| This is to you from stockman scott:
The Impeachment Question
washingtonpost.com
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, July 6, 2005; 1:24 PM
<<...More than four in 10 Americans, according to a
recent Zogby poll, say that if President Bush did not
tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with
Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable
through impeachment.
But you wouldn't know it from following the news. Only
three mainstream outlets that I can find made even
cursory mention of the poll last week when it came
out.
You also wouldn't know it judging from the political
discourse in Washington, but that makes a little more
sense. After all, impeachment is for all practical
purposes a political act, not a legal one. So with a
Republican-controlled Congress that doesn't even like
to perform basic White House oversight, it's basically
a moot point.
Nevertheless, could there be anything that 42 percent
of Americans agree on that the media care about so
little?
The poll results certainly illustrate the intense
polarization of the American electorate -- not exactly
news.
But they also suggest an appetite for more
investigation into Bush's reasons for war and
specifically -- in light of the assertions in the
Downing Street memos -- whether his public rationales
were in fact at all like his private rationales.
One topic for further inquiry, for instance, could be
whether in private conversations Bush expressed the
same kind of reticence about war that he advertised
publicly. Some evidence -- stories like this one in
Time, which quotes Bush saying in March 2002:
'[Expletive] Saddam. we're taking him out.' --
suggests otherwise.
Was Bush motivated more by personal animosity toward
Saddam Hussein than by a post-Sept. 11 desire to
protect America from a grave threat? Did he exaggerate
that threat? At what point was war inevitable?
Those are not settled questions. And evidently quite a
few Americans would like to see some accountability if
Bush deceived them...>> |
