Monday, June 27, 2011
Candidate Richard Nixon promised in 1968 that if elected president, he would end the war in Vietnam. In 1972, President Nixon, campaigning for reelection, assured the nation that “peace is at hand.”
In 1973, Congress passed the War Power Resolution to check the power of a president to commit the United States to war. Nixon’s veto of the Resolution was overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.
On 9 August 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency to escape impeachment for obstruction of justice and failure to uphold and defend the Constitution.
On 23 April 1975, in a speech at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford declared that the war in Vietnam was “finished as far as America is concerned.”
On 30 April 1975, newly installed South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh surrendered to the North, seven years after Candidate Nixon promised to end the war and after 116 years of wars alongside or against countries that included France, China, Japan, Britain, and America.
A routing survey of the more conspicuously contaminated muskegs of the information environment reveals that some of its most toxic denizens are calling to have Obama impeached for contriving his illegal non-hostilities war in Libya. John V. Walsh, one of the paleo-hooligan pens-for-hire at The American Conservative (one of my former gigs), recently redefined “yikes” by calling for Obama’s ouster on the basis that his disregard of the Constitution is in stark contrast to the understanding of and devotion to that document displayed by Tea Bag Barbie Palin and her adoring idolaters. One of the wags at Gordon Liddy’s beloved Washington Times (to wit: Eugene G. Windchy) wails that we’re “in a constitutional crisis” because of the way Obama is stiff-arming the War Powers Resolution, the law that, ironically, Dick Cheney and other leading neocons argue is unconstitutional because it hinders presidents from encroaching on the legislature’s exclusive Constitutional prerogative to declare war, and you didn’t hear Windchy or anybody else in the Big Brother News Network screaming about constitutional crises when Cheney was in power.
As distasteful as I find the agenda mix in every flavor of the political right, I’m inclined to sympathize with their desire to rein in the totalitarian tenor of Obama’s reign, but impeach the guy? Come on. Not even Denny Kucinich has a serious notion of doing such a thing. In the age of the New American Centurions, we don’t impeach presidents for taking us into illegal wars. These days we only impeach the most powerful politician on earth for lying about his inability to keep his orbs and scepter in his pants. (Interestingly enough, the last guy we impeached, Bubba Clinton, was the one who told Pavlov’s Dogs of War to take their letter demanding that he invade Iraq and stick it up their collective nose.)
We’ve been in a full-blown constitution crisis since 1950 when Harry Truman committed us to a full-blown war in Korea that ended in a negotiated tie with a foe that still flares up on us like a wicked case of facial herpes. The constitutional crisis Obama has created is just another twig on the pyre of our republic; making a federal case out of it (hah) won’t help anything. And after the Bush and Cheney administration flushed shame and irony and truth and accountability and the bill of rights all the way to the Congressional Cafeteria, who will ever impeach anyone for anything ever again?
Nor is it likely we’ll ever be able to vote the warmongers out of office. If you’re not curled up in a sleeping bag with the war profits machine you don’t get elected. Remember all that yak from candidate Obama about 16 months and we’re out of Iraq? It isn’t happening. Did you hear the yak from President Obama the other night about how he’s going to draw us down from the Bananastans? That prevarication had barely left his mouth before King David Petraeus was telling the little war correspondents embedded up his rump about how, well, he’d go along with it, but it wasn’t the way he’d like things done, no sir, if Obama was listening to his generals he’d be drawing down a darn sight slower, that’s what. And it wasn't long after King David’s press ploy that Obama started this standard shuffling retreat, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the military’s top bull feather merchant, announced that generals Obama was giving commanders “wide latitude” to execute the president's “broad timelines.”
And what were those broad timelines? In Obama-speak, "Starting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year." What in the wide world of sports, arts and sciences is that supposed to mean? I want to view the video of that speech in slo-mo so I can see Obama’s tongue flicking in and out.
The guy has fed us another bowl of horse plop and told us it’s chocolate ice cream, but that’s not going to keep him from being reelected. The only way South Side Slick won’t serve another term is if extra terrestrials reveal themselves to us and tell us that Obama not only wasn’t born in America, he wasn’t born on earth, and produce the original of his Vulcan birth certificate to prove it.
The only way I see us extracting ourselves from what even Uncle Bob Gates admits are “wars of choice” (he’s weary of them even though he had a huge hand in ensuring they never end) is if major political and media figures start stating in plain unvarnished patois that we’re pouring national blood and treasure into wars that have nothing to do with our national security aside from eroding it by creating a new generation of foreign terrorists willing to die to strike at America…
Catch the rest tomorrow…
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