My Two Cents

There's been a lot of people in the liberal blogosphere calling for the impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney recently, people who had declined to do so until recent political events (namely the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence).

Bloggers of a more radical bent have been calling for impeachment for years while those same liberal folks claimed that impeachment wasn't necessary or politically viable, while, in some cases, attacking the radical bloggers for being crazy or alarmist. Bloggers of an even more radical bent just sighed and went back to work, or ignored the whole farce altogether.

Just sayin'.

Second, I think that most of the liberal folks who are calling for impeachment are having problems seeing the big picture (a phrase I do hate, yes). The current system, insofar as it ever worked like it's supposed to (hell, even like it 'worked' from WWII-1992), is no longer working in the same fashion. We are even farther from the abstract ideal of a "democratic republic" or a "democracy" than we were before the middle of Clinton's term, when the nascent Conservative Movement really started frothing at the mouth.

There are lots of structural issues that are impeding impeachment (one of the large ones being that many people actually think we live in a democracy). If things were working like they do in high school government classes, the current President might not have made it into office in the first place, and certainly wouldn't have stayed in office past 2004.

More acute observers are aware that the fight is actually over 'maintaining the system' (and they say this like the system is worth keeping!), but I'm not sure even they realize how much things have changed, or how much things (even pre-Bush) don't match the abstract ideals many Americans hold about the United States.

Maybe this whole sad episode will radicalize some of them - it, along with the emergence of blogging and the Internet, sure has brought a bunch of new folks into politics - but I wonder about what they will learn from all of this. Will they learn about systems of oppression? Will they learn about structural power and the ugly side of U.S. history? Will they learn about the reasons Democrats went along with so much of this crap for a long time (and it's not just the people, people - it's the system), reasons like the two-party system and the need for campaign finance reform? Will they learn about the downside of capitalism instead of learning about the downside of Republican governance?

Will the learning people do - those that even bother, that is; I'm thinking mostly the recent upsurge in Democratic Party activists and "engaged citizens" - will their learning be about the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and how to wage a partisan political war, or will it involve challenging their assumptions about America? Will it involve doing some internal work and becoming different people?

Will it involve more than outrage?

Burnout Fast Approaching

Will someone please a) show this to anyone who thinks it's a good idea to sign up for the military; b) run this in papers and magazines in America that aren't The Nation; c) impeach the fuckers?

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned... [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little two-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs and she has a bullet through her leg... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me... like asking me why. You know, 'Why do I have a bullet in my leg?'... I was just like, 'This is, this is it. This is ridiculous'."

Specialist Michael Harmon, 24, of Brooklyn, 167th Armour Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In Al-Rashidiya on 13-month tour beginning in April 2003"

...

I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'... [Only when we got home] in... meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."

Specialist Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry. In Baquba for a year beginning February 2004

...

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population..."

Sergeant Camilo Mejía, 31, from Miami, National Guardsman, 1-124 Infantry Battalion, 53rd Infantry Brigade. Six-month tour beginning April 2003

...

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want." [emphasis mine]

Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. Four-month tour in Baghdad and Mosul beginning December 2004

"I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people. The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with, and everybody else be damned." [emphasis mine]

Sergeant Ben Flanders, 28, National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, 172nd Mountain Infantry. In Balad for 11 months beginning March 2004

This is going to affect the world for a very, very long time.

UPDATE: So, an occupation like this results in the dehumanization of the occupied, which in this case leads to massive amounts of racism, all while creating a bunch of sociopaths who can't empathize with the people around them because the people around them are civilians - an effect that persists once they get back to the US. Just sayin'.

Olbermann

Righteous Anger, indeed. He even calls on Bush and Cheney to resign.

The weird thing is that he doesn't seem to send wingers into their usual frothing rages. I think they're just ignoring him.

An excerpt:

We enveloped “our” President in 2001.

And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed, those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and sharpened it to a razor-sharp point, and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

The tragically funny part is that so many people saw it coming but were branded as crazy, a fact of which there's yet to be any recognition of.