Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Dennis Kucinich upset the corporate establishment June 11 by daring to introduce before Congress no less than 35 articles of impeachment against George Bush.  He had earlier demonstrated the audacity of transgressing even further by introducing articles against Bush's resident keeper, Dick Cheney.

The latest effort, as was its predecessor, was referred to the Judiciary Committee, constituting a presumed graveyard governing impeachment.  A June 12 Boston Globe headline announced:

BID TO IMPEACH BUSH FIZZLES OUT IN HOUSE

This response constituted a mild beginning for what followed.  The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel denounced local congressman and Kucinich impeachment articles co-sponsor Robert Wexler for wasting the public's time with such trivia.  The editorial ended by suggesting to Wexler and others that it was time to "move on to the real issues."

I wonder what the Founding Fathers would say if they were here to speak.  When none other than Alexander Hamilton, a champion of a strong executive, recommended that impeachment be included in the U.S. Constitution.

Could Hamilton and his colleagues been envisioning a trial to remove a chief executive for lying on an affidavit of a civil suit for engaging in an extra-marital affair?

How peculiar it was that our high-minded corporate media failed to criticize the aforementioned blatantly partisan and thoroughly ridiculous action aimed at Bill Clinton, when the time was ripe to tell Republican Senate and House members to "move on to the real issues."

There is no doubt increasing nervousness on the part of the neoconservative political establishment and their media toadies when citizens become as intelligently outraged as Patrick Burns of Seattle did in a letter to the editor in the June 17 Seattle Times.

Burns denounced Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's "off-hand dismissal of justice applied even to he who holds the highest rank" and called that act "an outright rejection of the notion that this nation is a land of laws and process, equally administered, in favor of political farce where law is an oppressive weapon applied discriminately against most of the rest of us.  Some people of higher rank in Pelosi's eyes are elevated above the law because litigation is too cumbersome, too difficult, too distracting in the Democratic Party's pursuit of magisterial power."

What if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson suddenly re-appeared in Bush-Cheney America?  

Washington was the Founding Father who, in his Farewell Address, cautioned the citizenry to "avoid foreign entanglements."  Jefferson was our third president with John Adams sandwiched in between, and earlier in his life he exercised such vigilant concern over individual liberties as to lobby for and ultimately include in the Constitution he penned the first ten amendments constituting a Bill of Rights.

What would Washington and Jefferson say if they learned about secretly removing a citizen of a foreign nation to a nation bereft of constitutional safeguards and interrogating ruthlessly without any specified time frame?  

What about snooping through libraries to determine what people have been reading without any warrant or explanation why such information is being gathered?

How about refusing to allow terrorist suspects right to counsel and indefinitely torturing them, including waterboarding?

What about scrapping the nation's search and seizure laws, protective safeguards under the Bill of Rights, and replacing them with an all-powerful executive that breaks into homes and removes evidence, then is also empowered to arrest, and then hold indefinitely while denying right to counsel or trial by jury?

How about invading a foreign nation on a baseless, easily disprovable lie that America was threatened by weapons of mass destruction, refusing to allow a UN team investigating that very charge the opportunity to finish its report before subjecting that same nation to a bombardment that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like pre-game warm-up drills?

What about holding secret meetings where the individual in charge holds more power than any vice president in history and is effectively providing access to unceasing enrichment in the nation being invaded during subsequent occupation?  

Oh, and this is the same company he served as its CEO and that continues to enrich him while in office while he ostensibly "serves the people."  This nation will be divided up among the vice president's corporation along with several selective others.

To simplify matters this entire process would be carried out without any competitive bidding.

Would Washington and Jefferson have found that, contrary to detractors, that Kucinich was addressing the "real issues" of America by introducing articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney?

Could it also be that they, given the foregoing, would consider such actions treasonous?

Should we also conclude based on the record that acts of treason have been committed in a nation where the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law have been replaced by neoconservative corporate dictatorship and unceasing, unchecked power residing in a lawless federal executive?