Earlier this week I wrote about the titanic fuck up that was Watergate. One of the things that I wish I had gone into a little more depth about is impeachment. Specifically, it is my contention that there isn't enough of it. I hear American liberals and conservatives alike continually howling at the moon about "imperial" or "criminal" presidencies, but none of them ever want to do the one thing that the Constitution expressly provides for: impeach the cocksuckers and remove them from office, post-haste.
Worse, they're not even willing to try to remove the evildoers from the palace. Most often they'll tell you that "there isn't a national consensus for impeachment." All that means is that "I'm afraid that I'll lose my fucking seat if I did it. Better still to let a member from some lunatic district in (insert your favorite deep Red or Blue state here) do it, and I'll go whichever way the wind does." But they'll always campaign in the next election as "Proud American Leaders", won't they?
Only two presidents - Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton - have been impeached. Both were acquitted by the Senate and served out their terms without any apparent sense of disgrace at all. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached and convicted. Any any number of criminal presidents died as respected statesmen, or soon will. Actually that's not true. The two oldest living former presidents, Carter and Bush 41, generally abided by the Constitution, which goes a long way in explaining why they were only one-term presidents.
As I said in the first paragraph, I'm of the mind that presidents aren't impeached nearly enough. If the United States seriously wants to consider itself a nation of laws, its presidents need to know that there actually are consequences for violating those laws. As it is, there have been a grand total of three serious impeachment attempts in since the Constitution was ratified 223 years ago. Do you really believe that there have only been two - Nixon and Clinton - criminal presidents? (Most scholars now agree that Andrew Johnson was railroaded, and his "High Crime" - violating the Tenure of Office Act - is now standard operating procedure)
Opponents of a given impeachment suggest that it only serves to "reverse an election." This is one of the rare instances in the human experience when people can be both completely full of shit and absolutely right at the same time. The entire point of impeachment is to reverse elections. This is because some elections warrant reversing. Americans (depending on their political affiliation at any given time) are so afraid of becoming a parliamentary system, as Nixon spent his entire post-presidential life arguing, that they'll forgive their presidents almost any and all crimes,
But they forget - or never knew - that Watergate was relatively minor, given what came before and after it.
As I mentioned this week, Nixon deserved to be removed for obstruction of justice. You can make a strong case for the other three Articles of Impeachment against Nixon, too, even though none of them are actual crimes.
If it were up to me, most of the modern presidents would be impeached, including some that I rather like.
- Harry Truman should have been impeached for making war in Korea without any prior congressional authorization. The United States had no mutual defense treaty with South Korea in 1950. The Constitution doesn't recognize the supremacy of the United Nations Security Council, therefore it cannot commit America to an extra-constitutional war.
- John F. Kennedy should have been impeached for a list of felonies too long to list here. And his brother would have been impeached right alongside him (remember, Cabinet members are "officers of the United States.")
- Lyndon Johnson should have been impeached for perpetrating a fraud on the Congress with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. We now know that LBJ was aware that the North Vietnamese "provocation" didn't actually happen. Hanoi never fired torpedoes at the Maddox on August 2, 1964, and Johnson knew it.
- The fact that Ronald Reagan wasn't impeached over Iran-Contra convinces me that Americans (and Republicans specifically) aren't serious about even the basic concept of justice. Reagan personally violated multiple laws in Iran-Contra. Even if you ignore the Boland Amendment and the "Contra" side of the scandal, Reagan's back-dating of intelligence findings when the jig was up made a mockery of the National Security Act of 1947, which expressly mandates a presidential finding to authorize a covert action. Say what you will about Watergate, but at least it didn't involve giving heavy artillery to terrorist states. Iran-Contra was easily the clearest example of impeachable offences in American history, bar none.
- Bill Clinton should have been impeached, not only for twice perjuring himself about blowjobs, but taking campaign money from the Godless Chinese military. I'd also impeach him for having anything at all to do with a reprehensible toad like Dick Morris, but I doubt the Senate would go along with me on that.
- George W. Bush should have been impeached for a mesmerizing level of incompetence. If the ruination of national security through two horribly fucked-up wars isn't a High Crime and Misdemeanor, I would suggest that nothing is. The selective declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to justify the aggressive war on Iraq was a fraud on the level of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. I also believe the Bush's "enhanced interrogation" program violated the Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory and carries the full force of federal law under the Constitution.
- Barack Obama's High Crimes and Misdemeanors include making war on Libya without congressional authorization and the targeted killing of American citizens "on the battlefield" - particularly those that have already been indicted by federal grand juries - absent the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law.
There were three problems with this.
First, it's a silly fucking idea. Censure is retarded and utterly without consequences. After censure, you retain all the powers of your office. The only difference is that everyone pretends not to like you during business hours. That's it.
Second, the Constitution doesn't provide for the censure of a president. Censure isn't mentioned in the Constitution, mostly because it falls under the Article One provision allowing Congress to implement its own rules. It is therefore a congressional procedure and decidedly not a constitutional mechanism for Congress to do anything outside the walls of Capitol Hill. To impose a congressional procedure on the executive branch would violate the "separation of powers" doctrine to the point that it wouldn't mean anything at all.
Third, Jackson was censured by a Whig Senate - and only the Senate. As soon as the Democrats regained control of that chamber, the censure was expunged from the record. For all intents and purposes, it didn't happen at all.
Not only is impeachment the way to go, it's the only way to go. Granted, if Congress doesn't have the balls to impeach, one can suppose that a clever U.S Attorney can indict a former president for criminal activity, but I think that no sitting president would allow that, for fear of what would await him upon leaving office.
Ford heroically imploded his own presidency in pardoning Nixon because he knew that the country couldn't withstand a presidential criminal trial after a decade and half of Watergate, Vietnam, three heart-rending assassinations and years of street riots. Gerald Ford inherited country that was literally falling apart and sacrificed everything to right it.
George W. Bush invoked executive privilege to spare Bill Clinton further investigation twice. Why? What is Obama's excuse for not even investigating George W. Bush? What will Obama's successor's excuse be for not investigating him? What did (or will) they sacrifice?
In a roundabout way, that brings me to President Obama's actions this week, specifically, his assertion of executive privilege to guarantee Attorney General Eric Holder's successful cover-up in Operation Fast and Furious
I love Operation Fast and Furious for a couple of reasons. First, I suggested in 2008 that the Mexican drug war was being fought with American guns, and some of my commentators thought I was insane. One went so far as to say that the gun were coming from Guatemala and Costa Rica, which was a laughable assertion, now totally disproven.
Second, the war is being fought entirely because Americans - not Mexicans - really like getting high. It isn't Juan Valdez that's doing blow off of a stripper's ass-crack, kids. It's Lindsay Lohan. The only reason that Mexico is involved at all is that it suffers from the unhappy geography of being between Point A - where the drugs are coming from, and Point B - the United States, where 5% of the world's population happily smokes, snorts and shoots up 50% of the world's drugs.
American guns are killing tens of thousands of Mexican citizens because the Mexican government is being pressured to prevent Americans from getting dizzy and dumb. It's an atrocity of overwhelming stupidity that I'm continually amazed that the people of Mexico tolerate for even a second. Worst of all, Mexico is merely a transit point for the drugs. It isn't even a major producer.
The inescapable fact is that these Mexicans are being killed by both the American War on Drugs and the inability of the United States to control guns. Nothing's funnier than watching people like Dana Loesch hyperventilating on Twitter about the 300 Mexicans and 2 Americans killed by Fast and Furious guns, but ignore entirely the 57,000 Mexicans that have been killed by American guns from other sources. Nor has she justified why any Mexicans should be killed because Lindsay Lohan likes doing blow. Ms. Loesch just takes it as a given that they should be. Her inhumanity almost makes me not want to fuck her. Almost. She is pretty hot, after all. And silly shit like politics should never get in the way of that.
So, yes, I'd eat her pussy until she cums so hard that she thinks that she's going to die. But, as a matter of principle, I would pretend not to like it very much. I've brought pretty, moronic girls that believe crazy shit off before and, God help me, I'll probably do it again.
Anyhow, I spent most of yesterday watching the Breitbart, RedState and Fox News crews melting down over something - executive privilege - that they're either too dumb to understand or can't bring themselves to admit that just they're wrong about. Or it might just be that they're lying because their shithead politics demands that they do so.
My friend, hero, and the finest fucking writer on all of the Interwebs, Velociman, seems to have fallen for it, too. He wrote:
A quick aside on "executive privilege," which my brother courteously reminded me of today: it don't exist. It is an extra-constitutional device Eisenhower concocted during the Army and McCarthy hearings to protect national security issues.Actually, that`s not true. The concept is inherent in the Constitution`s "separation of powers" doctrine, and Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Jackson asserted early forms of it.
Moreover, one wouldn't think that hiding communist subversion of the military from the United States Senate by invoking executive privilege would actually protect national security, would one? Also, Truman did it first, going so far as to move FBI files into the White House itself and barring executive branch employees from testifying.
Yes, Eisenhower rightly thought that Joe McCarthy was a cunt, but he also had precedent going for him. Not for nothing, but Ike had the facts on his side with that one. No paranoid, fearmongering, Milwaukee drunkard; regardless of his office, should presume to hold a higher claim on the military than the president of the United Fucking States.
Most frequently, executive privilege has been asserted to protect conversations with, and advice given to, the president. Without that protection, the argument goes, no one would be able to freely give their honest opinions to the president for fear of being dragged onto Capitol Hill to explain them.
Congress, in its oversight capacity, has the right to compel members of the Cabinet to appear before it. After all, they are confirmed "upon advice and consent of the Senate" and Congress approves their budgets. And Congress is pretty dilligent about not asking them about conversations that they have with the president, mostly because they know that they won't get an answer.
However, direct employees of the executive branch - the White House staff, which isn't confirmed by the Senate - usually aren't subject to being called to testify. That's why you never see the White House Chief of Staff or the National Security Adviser appearing before congressional committees.
The second President Bush spent weeks saying that he wouldn't allow his National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, to appear before the congressionally created 9/11 Commission, although he waived any objection to Former President Clinton's, Sandy Berger, from appearing.As we'll soon learn, a sitting president can invoke executive privilege to the benefit of a former president.
The separation of powers upon which executive privilege is based, is also why, for example, Congress can't call federal judges before it to "explain their decisions", as weapons-grade fuckheads like Newt Gingrich think they should. Although, I'll grant you that any number of liberal assholes would like to call the living majority members in Bush v. Gore up to the Hill and slap 'em around in public some.
Amazingly. I don't remember Gingrich howling when the Senate Judiciary Committee wanted opinions that John Roberts wrote for the Reagan White House's Office of Legal Counsel and as a staffer to then-Solicitor General Kenn Starr in the first Bush administration during his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice of the United States. Roberts' Reagan records were obtained through the Reagan Presidential Library. His work for Justice, to my knowledge, never was. That was covered by, you guessed it, executive privilege!
Oh, and the Roberts work for Bush 41 was protected because Bush 43 re-wrote the Presidential Records Act of 1978 - which was passed by Congress and everything ... by executive order.
The separation of powers and executive privilege doesn't just apply to national security, as some dishonest Internet hacks might tell you. They apply to all presidential communications (with the exceptions of those that directly apply to criminal conduct, as decided 8-0 in Nixon v. United States)
In fact, the Court upheld the notion of executive privilege in Nixon, recognizing "the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties" and that "[h]uman experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decision making process."
People like Ms. Loesch spent all day yesterday on Twitter being almost malignalanty dishonest (although it would be incredibly unfair to overlook the fact that they might actually be retarded) in suggesting that any suggestion that there is a precedent was saying "Blame BOOOOSH", which seems to be the primary GOP-Tea Party excuse for their own fucking history, y'know, when they aren't telling us how great everything would be if Reagan was still calling the shots from the Great Beyond.
Because they are self-described revolutionaries, rather than conservatives, Tea Party folks like Dana aren't particularly fond of precedent unless that precedent serves their immediate political ends and somehow involves "Shit Ronald Reagan Said."
But the respect for precedent is something that makes First World countries different from Banana Republics. And those idiots love it when you call it the "Rule of Law", so long as George Zimmerman or Scooter Libby aren't involved.
Bush invoked executive privilege a bunch of times, never once - contrary to yesterday's Web chatter - involving "national security" (a singular justification for the doctrine that was apparently invented just yesterday, as I had never heard anyone suggest that executive privilege can only be applied to national security before then. Usually, the classification process and the "state secrets doctrine" were enough.)
He twice invoked it to protect the Clinton administration, once in denying evidence of the Department of Justice's complicity in Whitey Bulger's decades-long psychotic crime spree, and then to cover-up Clinton's aforementioned illegal fundraising from the People's Revolutionary Army.
Then Bush invoked the privilege to protect the privacy of the vice-president's conversations with scumbag oil and gas lobbyists, which is singular. Never before had a vice-president's communications that didn't involve the president been considered grounds for executive privilege. If only Spiro Agnew had lived long enough ...The best part? Cheney later went on to assert that vice president's office is not an "entity within the executive branch" at all! Psyche!
See, Cheney wasn't funny just because he shot old folks in the head and chest. He had other punchlines, too! Try this one at a party, "I'm vice president, but because I'm paid by the United States Senate I'm not a part of the executive branch! Oh, but I can still have executive privilege asserted to keep my meetings with motherfucker lobbyist assholes secret! Bang, bang!"
If you miss Andy Kauffman as much as I did, you probably found the Cheney years delightful.
In the summer of 2007, Bush invoked executive privilege four times in five weeks, three of them relating to the probably political firing of U.S Attorneys and to quash congressional subpoenas issued to Harriet Meirs, Sara Taylor and Karl Rove. The fourth involved records pertaining to the friendly-fire homicide of Army Ranger and NFL player Pat Tillman.
So let's review the Bush record on executive privilege, shall we? They involved a mobster, campaign finance, Dick Cheney's meetings with cocksucker lobbyists, the possible political misuse of the Justice Department, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding the shooting of a soldier-football player-American martyr.
No reasonable person would suggest that any of them involves national security. Amazingly, I don't remember radio talk show hosts or fucking bloggers going crazy at the time. I could be wrong, though. Twitter didn't exist in 2001-07. But the fact that they're openly lying about Bush's executive privilege claims - which took me all of 30 seconds to dig up - suggests something more nefarious and political.
So when you read that Bush only used executive privilege to protect national security, ask them when. Watch them blush and stutter. You'll enjoy it, I promise.
Now, do I think that President Obama and Attorney General Holder are using it to cover up? Of fucking course I do. There's no other reason to invoke the privilege, unless Obama personally directed Fast and Furious from the White House, or had some direct communication regarding it while the operation was ongoing, which is a whole other can of worms. Of course Obama and Holder are lying.Shit, you'd have to high, insane, stupid or all three not to know that.
The relevant question is whether Obama and Holder are covering up political embarrassment or an actual crime. If it's a crime, then it's incumbent on Darrel Issa and his scumbag blogger fan club to march into court and prove it. The Nixon v. United States precedent does allow for that. Either way, the Republican House is free and able to impeach the both of them.
Somehow - and maybe it's because I'm psychic - I know that they won't. This is because they're starting to think that Mitt Romney might somehow get elected president. Once that happens, he can start abusing executive privilege (and, God, why would I think he'd do that?) and Romney's Twitter, blogosphere and cable news puppets will pretend that it's business as usual again.
Better still, they'll say "Well, Obama did it." Just as Bush got away with what he did because Clinton did it, Obama will be excused because of what Bush did.
And that, my friends, is how the United States Constitution was destroyed. If you think that social media, talk radio and cable news are serving constitutionalism, rather than patrtisan hysteria, you're very probably a fucking moron. Look at the horseshit that you've read on Twitter and blogs, heard on talk radio and seen on Fox News over the last 36 hours. Then look up the facts. Notice how they're different?
You've got a really nice country. I like it a lot and have spent over 30 years of my life studying it's history in some depth.
It's a shame you've gotta fuck it up like you have over horseshit, blogs, talk radio, Twitter and stupidity. The more religious types among you worry about America becoming Rome, forgetting entirely that sodomy is fun and stupidity is just sad.
I'd love to go on, but I've got a border fence to build. Some good Republicans once warned me that when the shit hits the fan down south, a man needs a good fence. How lethally electric that fence should be was never resolved, but moats with alligators were mentioned.
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