Friday, May 25, 2007

Why Bush Hasn’t Been Impeached

Gary Kamiya tells us why Bush hasn't been impeached, and why he won't be. It's not just that
The Democrats think it’s bad politics. Bush is dying politically and taking the GOP down with him, and impeachment is risky. It could, so the cautious Beltway wisdom has it, provoke a backlash, especially while the war is still going on. ...

But there’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.

Arthur Silber is half right: The war in Iraq, and the upcoming war in Iran, is fundamentally about American exceptionalism, our "angry, resentful patriotism". But, with all due respect, I think Silber is not completely correct: It is not the politicians or even the big name bloggers who are pushing this exceptionalism. The American people themselves are demanding this narrative, and they will viciously turn against anyone, politician, pundit or blogger, who denies or contradicts it, just as the German people positively demanded an exceptionalist narrative in the 1930s.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t to The Left End of the Dial)

1 comment:

  1. And if we can't even expect the newly elected members of Congress to stand firm with an anti-war vote (or at LEAST to demand deadlines), after they were voted in to do just that - how can we expect them to move ahead of the pack and impeach. (Not to mention if we don't start with Cheney first, we're worse off than when we began).

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