My brother sent me a post by John Nichols on his blog “The Online Beat†at www.thenation.com pertaining to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s contemplation of whether or not to take up the standard for the cause of Bush’s impeachment (and presumably Cheney’s as well) in the House, as well as to whether make it a central piece of his Presidential campaign agenda. According to Nichols, Kucinich sees the administration’s rattling of sabers pointed at Iran as the causus belli, so to speak, based on legal and Constitutional grounds. Others coming at the Iran situation from a knowledgeable military history and strategy perspective, such as retired Army Intelligence officer Pat Lang and John Boyd apostle William Lind, see it as unlikely to accomplish anything positive, while at the same time posing the worst kind of down-side risks: those that are not only likely to occur but will also cause grave damage if the do indeed come to pass.
If Kucinich does in fact take up the cause, I believe he would be well advised to drop the Iran justification and concentrate on the emerging rule-of-law corruption issue. Just in the two days since Nichols posted his piece about Kucinich information has come to light from various sources, including but not limited to the administration’s document dumps, that this may spread far beyond the apparent firing of eight US District Attorneys because they didn’t press their thumbs down on the scales of justice with a level of force sufficient to please Karl Rove. For starters, how about the other 85 prosecutors whose thumbs were, apparently, satisfactorily heavy. Wednesday there were several posts on the net about an ongoing study of the George W. Bush Justice Department being done by Donald Shields and John Cragan, two retired professors who did their graduate work 35 years ago at the U of MN. Here’s a teaser:
We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys’ federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).
Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.
Our paper explores the role of the fourth estate and others in detecting such profiling and concludes that what is really needed is transparency, the highlights of which are noted below.
The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.
This is the deliberate undermining of the rule of law on a truly breathtaking scale. It means that every case involving alleged political corruption is now open to questions of legitimacy. Hopefully Rep. John Conyers will subpoena many of the US District Attorneys who weren’t fired, especially those whose districts had the most one-sided investigation records, and ferret out just what kind of marching orders they received from Washington.
I believe this deliberate political profiling is an issue on which to base the case for impeachment that is far better than the Iran business for reasons of both policy and political tactics. Although vast majorities view the Iraq venture as the fiasco that it is, and see a possible attack on Iran as throwing good blood and treasure after bad, my sense is that the Iran case will be a much harder sell for at least two reasons. First, unless impeachment takes place after the fact it would be like trying to indict and convict someone of a crime they were only contemplating committing. Secondly, many Americans are concerned that impeachment in these circumstances would set a precedent for future Presidents that could severely tie their hands when facing future threats. The administration’s attack on the rule of law, by contrast, appears to be something that has been ongoing since the outset of Bush’s first term and intentionally kept under the radar. As Shields and Cragan point out, the Democrat candidates investigated have seldom been of people seeking state-wide or national office. Instead they’ve gone after candidates for state legislature, city council and dog catcher, the apparent insidious intent being to keep the news limited to local media outlets where the cumulative effects would be a negative image of the Democrats, while at the same time keeping it out of state-wide and national media, thus making it harder to connect the dots. It almost worked.
As I had feared when I wrote a post on the subject last October, the ghost of then minority leader and now Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “impeachment is off the table†statement of May, 2006, is already coming back to haunt. As Nichols notes, impeachment is gaining traction at the grass roots, at least outside of the blood-red states. If the grass-roots movement becomes an unstoppable juggernaut you can be sure that Pelosi’s unfortunate statement will move to the top of the list of right wing talking screaming points.