Cowardice In The House Of Representatives

Today the House voted on the 35 articles of impeachment which were put forth by Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. As everyone predicted, it was sent to the House Judiciary Committee to die just as Kucinich’s earlier call for the impeachment of Dick Cheney did. It really is too bad that of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only two had the courage to defend the Constitution. One of them as mentioned before was Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. The other was Florida Representative Robert Wexler. The cowardice of Democratic leadership such as Nancy Pelosi and Stenny Hoyer is hardly surprising given their past statements(such as Pelosi’s quote that impeachment is “off the table), but it is still disappointing.

Their reasoning has been that we are mere months away from the election and that they don’t want to harm their chances. Of course, the impeachment of Bill Clinton for a far lesser crime(purgery officially) didn’t hurt the Republicans given that they took the White House soon after so one has to wonder just why the Democratic leadership thinks that impeachment would be politically bad, especially since as of this writing in a non-scientific poll by MSNBC 89% of respondents said they think that Bush should be impeached.

President Bush Continues Rattling His Saber

During his trip to Germany, President Bush raised the specter of taking military action against Iran. German Chancellor Merkel gave her own opinion without directly contradicting President Bush’s statement:

“We talked just now at some length about this. I very clearly pin my hopes on diplomatic efforts and I believe that diplomatic pressure actually already has taken effect. If you look at the situation in Iran on the ground, you see that quite clearly. These efforts can have a success, but this presupposes, obviously, that the global community is sort of unified. Both in the European Union and in the world (sic) Security Council we have to continue this common approach. We cannot exclude either that there may well be a further round of sanctions, and those need to be negotiated in the Security Council of the United Nations. What’s important now is to see to it that this last round of the sanctions is actually implemented and can take effect, because the effectiveness of sanctions is actually been proved only once they are taken seriously. And we are under certain — quite a considerable pressure to act together and in concert. And we in the European Union will do everything to see to it that this actually happens.”

Bush referred to diplomacy as his first choice and said that we will give diplomacy a chance to work. However, he also mentioned that “all options are on the table” without being asked about military action. This of course lead to questions about Iraq, and the President repeated that he has absolutely no regrets about lying the American people into a war with only the slightest admission of error(though he clothed the admission in lies and hubris):

“I don’t regret it at all. Removing Saddam Hussein made the world a safer place. And yes, I told the guy — the guy said, now what could you do over? First of all, you don’t get to do things over in my line of work. But I could have used better rhetoric to indicate that one, we tried to exhaust the diplomacy in Iraq; two, that I don’t like war. But, no, the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision.

Once again we see the difference between a leader who understands that diplomacy is necessary and our President who ignorantly labelled diplomacy as “appeasement.”