Monday, May 21, 2012

The Impeachment of George W. Bush



Today, I was researching The Patriot Act, just for fun, and I remembered a fact that I had amazingly forgotten.  In 2008, there was a serious attempt to impeach president George W. Bush.  It wasn't the act of fringe radicals, but a broad-based Resolution sponsored by congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler.  The U.S. House of Representatives voted 251 to 166 to refer the impeachment resolution to the Judiciary Committee on July 25, where, amazingly, no further action was taken on it.  Bush was, by this point, almost out of office, and the impeachment became a moot point.  Basically, what the impeachment alleged is what lots of Americans now believe: that Bush misled the American people into believing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and subsequently abused his power by invading Iraq without a declaration of war, and that the real reason had to do with American oil interests.


You can read the entire articles of impeachment HERE.


Having recently watched the movie Frost/Nixon and visited the Nixon Library with my friend Joel Beers, I am a little disturbed that George W. Bush has been able to walk away from a morally questionable presidency with impunity.  I would love for him to admit, as Nixon did, that he made serious mistakes and, in doing so, caused a lot of people, myself included, to lose some faith in American politics.  I am not alone in believing that American politics are dominated by large corporate interests, and that many politicians are essentially in the pocket of big banks, defense contractors, oil companies, drug companies, etc.  The other morning, I woke up with a strong conviction to run for U.S. congress against Ed Royce, just so I could call him out on this stuff and maybe have a little bit of an audience.



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