It seems to me that this editorial is leaving out a few key things. 1) Osama is still out there. 2) The Iraq war was based on a lie. 3) Katrina. 4) Defecit. Those really are the kicker for me. No amount of pathetic sugarcoating (as this author has done) can succesfully shield me from these glaring FAILURES. Nevermind that most of that sugarcoating is just blatant pandering. Americans are saving more thanks to Bush? Bush somehow is the reason that stem cell research is continuing? Bush saved the American economy? And on and on and on... Pssssshhhhh. Keep drinking that kool-aid.
hum... Americans have dim view of Bush, Dem leadership Americans share a bleak view of the job performances both of President Bush and of congressional Democratic leadership, according to a CNN poll released Thursday. The president's approval rating in the poll, conducted Dec. 6 through Sunday by Opinion Research Corporation, was 32 percent, tying his all-time low rating from June. Sixty-six percent disapproved of how Bush is handling his job, the poll found, about equal to the 65 percent early last month. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/12/13/americans-have-dim-view-of-bush-dem-leadership/ ------------- surge on!
Any credibility for a "moral line" on ESC would be to ban in-vitro fertilization, which continues to trash those embryos that would've gone to science and would not have been a complete waste. There has been some improvements in Bush's 2nd term, but they're as long term as the ARM I used to have.
i don't follow you- are you suggesting that if you're in favor of IVF you must support embyonic stem cell research?
devils advocate...which yall hate osama is"out there" but seems very restricted. iraq was based on bad information Katrina? huh? don't even know what the hell that has to do with it all. Katrina was more of a State level F-up than the presidents. Defecit. Not that pressing of an issue. A surplus doesnt mean squat if you neglect proper funding in areas.
true, it was screwed up on different, true its not the president's fault the levees collasped, but the organization under his watch was ill prepared to handled the disaster becuase of unqualified leaders. something all too familiar with his presidency. says the man with the ever declining purchase power
What I'm saying is that if you're against ESC on moral grounds, then you should be against the current widely practiced methods of IVF. Big difference.
You're not a Devil's Advocate. You're making those statements because they comport with what you believe. You're not making those statements in disinterest to merely judge the validity of the positions.
via TPM - http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ -- It's another late Friday afternoon deluge of bad news and misdeeds. Senate Republicans successfully maneuver to block the House-passed anti-torture bill. The Attorney General refuses to provide the Senate with information on the CIA torture tapes and tells the CIA not to cooperate with the House investigation of the tapes. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will allow telecom immunity to come up for a floor vote. Another good day for democracy. --David Kurtz
This seemed like a good thread to post this in. Written by a guy I voted for, a WWII war hero, a US Senator for several terms, and a fine, decent man. Pretty amazing to be able to add the last bit there, all things considered. Enjoy. Why I Believe Bush Must Go Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse. By George McGovern Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01 As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president. After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me. Today I have made a different choice. Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. But what are the facts? Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard. From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation. In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history. All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era? How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness? It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people. Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus. Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades. Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others. Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors." I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin. There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../01/04/AR2008010404308.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 Impeach George W. Bush.
As much as I would love to say that Bush's economic plan is working, etc etc...I just can't. What this piece fails to tell us is that while people are going back to work, they are doing so at a greatly reduced wage than they had before. It's better than nothing, but it does not cure the financial ills of the people. I am a consumer bankruptcy lawyer, and my office has been filled with people who had been laid off and are now working much lower paying jobs. In short...this is a very misleading statistic without the money end of the equation being factored in.
good read - not only should this administration be impeached, they should be imprisoned for their crimes. of course they completely lied about iraq and everyone knows it, but i would go after them on 3 key issues where they clearly broke the law. 1. authorization of torture 2. illegal wiretaps 3. illegally spending $2.6 billion on fake news stories, propaganda and buying off reporters. any and all 3 of these items are violations of federal law and should land bush/cheney in prison. i know they have less than a year left, but bush/cheney need to be held accountable for their crimes. i dont think we can just wait for their term to end - desperate people do desperate things - i think a scenario where we have another terrorist attack and bush declares martial law and suspension of the elections is very likely if they are not held accountable.
The window for impeaching Bush closed a long time ago -- not sure why some of you still think it's an option.
Maybe so but Bush obviously knows that there is a very real chance of criminal and civil suits after he leaves office. That's why he has very quietly purchased over a 100 thousand acres in Paraguay a couple of years ago. Gotta have an escape route you know.
Since he committed these actions as President, he has qualified immunity from suit under section 1983.
I think Bush has gotten a free pass because of Clinton's impeachment. Nobody in congress and most of the people in the nation don't want to go through with that again. So Bush hasn't been held responsible as much as he could have been for the things he's done.
Held reponsible? He absolutely was held responsible. The people of our great nation rewarded him with 4 more years. Just goes to show how ridiculously out of touch the impeachment Klan really is...
I agree. Impeachment now would be one of the worst things that could happen to this country and especially to the Dems. The last things a Democratic candidate wants is to be constantly distracted by a nasty debate on impeachment. GW Bush is going to be out of office in a little more than a year from now and trying to hasten that isn't going to be good for the country.
Yes. that's what it shows. The impeachment Klan is much more out of touch than those that think Americans wanted to reward Bush.
