The Wake

On November 8 of last year, President Bush sawed off a dead leg as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “resigned.” Americans insofar had sat quiet through the exodus of the neo-cons, the members of President Bush’s cabinet who are largely responsible for the war in Iraq and the Bush post-9/11 platform of war profiteering and expansive executive power. The timeliness of Rummy’s resignation carries with it a weight that the previous exits of Powell, Ashcroft, Card, Fleisher, McLellan, Tenet, Wolfowitz, Feith, O’Neill, Veneman, Thompson, Snow, Norton, Evans, Paige, Martinez, Mineta, Principi, and Ridge, (to name a few) didn’t. With Rumsfeld out and a slew of southpaws in congress, Dick Cheney is a sitting quail.

Poor marksmanship is the least of Cheney’s problems these days. Remember in August of 2002 when he appeared on Meet the Press and said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,”? Well, 234 Democrats in the new House of Representatives do. Democrats know, too, that based on accounts from people like former CIA Europe Bureau Chief Tyler Drumheller, ex-CIA analyst Paul Pillar, ex-CIA Chief of Staff John Brennan, Colin Powell’s top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson and numerous others, that through a secretive Pentagon office occupied by neo-con hawks Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, Cheney based his WMD case against Iraq by cherry-picking faulty intelligence reports that the CIA knew lacked credibility. This has been chronicled in several books. For an accurate and intriguing exposé, watch an episode of PBS’s Frontline titled, “The Dark Side,” that aired last year. It is available for viewing online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/.

Certainly Cheney was not the only person selling the war in 2002 and 2003. Other major promoters of WMD propaganda included former Secretary of State Powell, ex-CIA Director George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Bush. Powell and Tenet left office long ago. Rumsfeld is history. Rice is guilty of spewing loads of pre-war rubbish, but she is believed to have been speaking to the things she was hearing from the likes of Rumsfeld and Tenet.

So there are Bush and Cheney facing an opposition legislature for the first time. The Republicans House in 1999 wanted to impeach President Clinton for lying about his personal sexual transgressions, and they spent $40,000,000 investigating him; far, far more than was spent to investigate the events of September 11, 2001. Clinton’s offenses pale in comparison to those of Bush and Cheney, who misled the country into a perilous war that has toppled America’s moral high-ground in the world. Cheney, not Bush, may suffer the wrath of Democrats.

An attempt to impeach Bush might only empower likely 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, who could assert that a Bush impeachment was nothing more than vengeful political gamesmanship on the part of bitter Democrats. Moreover, there isn’t a strong public outcry to impeach Bush. The impeachment of Dick Cheney, however, can be carried out swiftly using stellar politics.

Senator McCain, and many others in congress, are promoting the creation of an independent office that would investigate accusations of official misconduct and determine which charges are worthy of congressional oversight hearings. The Democrats should pass this legislation in the spirit of nonpartisanship and good government. Upon the implementation of this new office, Democrats should recommend that it examine Cheney’s pre-war campaign, which contained countless deceptive statements similar to the Meet the Press quote. That office would have no choice but to forward the matter to congress, in light of so many credible sources claiming that Cheney knowingly misled. The oversight committees, in Democratic control, would move to impeach and the House majority would prevail.

The divided Senate may or may not vote with the House. Funny, Senator McCain finds himself in a very compromising position; difficult for him to vote against Senate Republicans, but equally difficult for him to side with an exposed Dick Cheney. Even if he were to vote against a Cheney impeachment, he could hardly use it against Democrats in ’08, since the censure would have come from the independent office that he championed.

Impeaching Vice President Cheney is a win-win move for Democrats and for America. The country cannot tolerate leaders in the highest offices of government who manipulate intelligence and cheat our governing processes. The new congress must send the message to Bush, and to future presidents, that honest leadership is essential to a functioning democracy, and officials who abuse power will be not only be caught, but they will suffer the consequences as prescribed by the Constitution.