[MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] George McGovern: "Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse."

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

During Nixon's second term and the Watergate era we used to say "Don't 
blame me, I'm from Massachusetts!"  McGovern won only Massachusetts and 
D.C., but 29 million people nationwide (37.5% of those voting) voted for 
him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election%2C_1972

He was a US representative for 4 years and a US senator for 18 years, and 
before that he was a World War II combat veteran.  Despite such massive 
achievements as these, many people who happily take all of Rush Limbaugh's 
advice will dismiss the article below because it was written by "a loser" 
(e.g., see comments at Washington Post):

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/dot.comments/2008/01/mcgovern.html

Funny how people believe whatever they want to believe and they 
rationalize excuses for rejecting sources of information that don't fit 
neatly into their world views.

Mike


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/04/AR2008010404308.html

Washington Post
Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01

Why I Believe Bush Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.

By George McGovern <EMAIL:PROTECTED>

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.


© 2008 The Washington Post Company

_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion