Candace

Talmadge

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January 14, 2008

They Act Like Children, So Bush and Cheney Need the Boundaries of Impeachment

Yes, there still are parents who set boundaries for their children and, if the kids violate those boundaries, make them face real consequences.

Too bad the president and vice president of the United States do not also face real consequences for all the boundaries they have trampled wholesale.

Jane Hambledon of Fort Dodge, Iowa, sold the car she bought for her 19-year-old son at Thanksgiving after she found alcohol under the front passenger seat. According to the Associated Press, she made two rules – boundaries – when she gave her son the vehicle. No alcohol on board, and keep it locked.

He broke the first boundary, and his excuse that a passenger left the booze bottle wasn’t enough for his mother.

In spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant, lying about his reasons for invading Iraq, lying about CIA torture of detainees and lying about the outing of a covert CIA agent working on counter-terrorism, George Bush and Dick Cheney have also violated serious legal boundaries, otherwise known as the laws of this land.

Bush and Cheney have yet to experience any real consequences for their actions, except low poll numbers. For all of their time in office, Congress has been and remains MIA – even with the Democrats in the majority – on real oversight of the executive branch mandated by the U.S. Constitution.

Ms. Hambledon’s tongue-in-cheek classified ad to sell the car reads, in part, “Totally uncool parents who obviously don’t love their son are selling his car,” and calls her “the meanest mom on the planet.”

I call her a mom with enough commendable strength of character to enforce the boundaries she set. She and her husband love their son more than he’ll ever know, unless and until he has children of his own. Her son isn’t happy with her right now, but he can either earn the money to buy his own car or do without.

Compare Ms. Hambledon to the mother who helped her six-year-old daughter lie about her father being killed in Iraq just to win tickets to a rock concert, and then claimed that she thought it would be OK to send in a fictitious tale because the rules didn’t specifically state the essays had to be truthful.

The preceding tortuous logic smacks of that infamous White House memo (subsequently withdrawn after surfacing publicly) justifying what a reasonable person would call torture – provided the pain and wounds inflicted didn’t outright kill the tortured. Such impressive restraint and humanity.

Too bad the feckless current congressional leadership can’t grow a backbone like Ms. Hambledon’s. After calling for impeachment before the 2006 mid-term elections, the Democrats eked out a victory and immediately took impeachment “off the table,” in the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Why? Nothing’s changed. Indeed, it now appears that the Bush administration, in order to bang on its “Iran threat” drums yet again, lied about the nature of an encounter last week in the Straits of Hormuz between U.S. Navy ships and boats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Can we spell G-U-L-F O-F T-O-N-K-I-N?

Despite the lack of courage among congressional leaders, an incipient revolt among some House members may yet break out in the open and eventually garner national media coverage. Next week, Florida Democrat Robert Wexler plans to ask Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., to hold impeachment hearings for Cheney. The House Judiciary Committee also has before it a resolution to impeach Bush from Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

These two have a year left in office, so there isn’t enough time for the entire impeachment process to play out. But congressional testimony, in public and under oath, will go a long way toward revealing the details of their mendacity and deception to the American people, and help prevent any attempts to lie us into another war or to postpone the 2008 elections for some vague and veiled “national security” rationale.

The survival of the U.S. as a republic depends on enforcing the boundaries even for those in the highest government offices – especially since they keep acting like children.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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