Retirement
Monday, May 11, 2009 at 10:30PM
The time is overdue, but I am finally removing this graphic from my website sidebar. The graphic, courtesy of a fellow blogging physician who has since shut down his website, was part of my small effort to bring a dishonest politician to some kind of justice.
The impeachment effort against George W. Bush went nowhere, mostly thanks to the pathetic and craven Democratic leadership -- and here, I'll blame Nancy Pelosi more than anyone else. Pelosi and friends calculated that they could win the election in 2008, but that if they pursued impeachment against the president they would risk a political backlash that would jeopardize their majorities in the House and Senate. They chose a power grab over justice and left W in office. It will take a generation of historians to calculate the cost to this country of leaving him in office for another two years, but I feel certain it will be far higher than most of us would currently guess.
What angers me the most about the refusal of the Democrats to impeach Bush -- even though it is clear to me that he could have been impeached on charges of incompetence alone, not to mention his response to Hurricane Katrina, civil rights violations, systematic lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction, and widespread corruption -- is that impeachment could have avoided much of the grief we now face over the torture issue. If Bush had been axed in say, 2007, we could now say that Bush committed war crimes, but we sent him on his way. It would not be entirely satisfactory from a legal standpoint, but at least it would be an answer to critics. And to our consciences.
Because we did not impeach Bush, because we let him off scot-free, we as a nation are still on the hook for the human rights violations that occured on the Bush watch. That's what happens when you fail to do the right thing; it comes back to revisit you.
We should have gotten rid of this scoundrel the first chance we got. Instead, we get to live with him still.
Reader Comments (1)