Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

Can Republicans Put Country Before Party?
(cross-posted on firedoglake)

President George W. Bush is the
Republican Party’s Vietnam.

When I interviewed John
Dean about Abu Ghraib, his book had already gained steam. When I saw Senator
Lindsay Graham so unabashedly ignorant as to the true history of Watergate during
the recent Judiciary Committee hearings, taking the time to insult Mr. Dean,
the situation in which we find ourselves today made so much sense. It’s
as if the Republican Party has fallen into an abyss of political amnesia.

… The first fundamental question that
needs to be answered by and about the president, the vice president, and their
political and national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza
Rice, to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet,
to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying,
disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been
a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome
truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to
defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly
failed.

(snip)

Bush and Cheney have been hardly less
succinct about the president's duty and right to assume unprecedented authority
nowhere specified in the Constitution. “[E]specially in the day and age
we live in … the president of the United States needs to have his Constitutional
powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national-security
policy,” Cheney said less than four months ago.

Bush's doctrine of “unimpairment”—at
one with his tendency to trim the truth—may be (with the question of
his competence) the nub of the national nightmare. “I have the authority,
both from the Constitution and the Congress, to undertake this vital program,”
Bush said after more than a few Republican and conservative eminences said
he did not and joined the chorus of outrage about his N.S.A. domestic-surveillance
program.

“Terrorism is not the only new danger of this
era,” noted George F. Will, the conservative columnist. “Another
is the administration's argument that because the president is commander in
chief, he is the 'sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs' … [which]
is refuted by the Constitution's plain language, which empowers Congress to
ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces, and make
laws 'necessary and proper' for the execution of all presidential powers.”
…

Senate
Hearings on Bush, Now, by Carl Bernstein

In Carl Bernstein’s Vanity Fair article, Bernstein makes the
point that to really know the truth about what’s happening within our
government, Republicans and Democrats must join together to ask tough questions
of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a host of other characters,
including Dr. Condoleezza Rice. But can you imagine such a thing happening?

George W. Bush’s disapproval ratings are 10 points higher than Bill Clinton’s
during the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio. That’s quite a feat. They’re
set to go even lower if the war in Iraq doesn’t open out onto an Iraqi
government of at least some legitimacy. The doubts about that happening have
reached critical mass.

Some of us remember the Nixon impeachment hearings well. Others of you have
read about them in detail. I was one of the first people to ask where are the
Howard Bakers
of the Republican Party? So, I find it ironic that in Bernstein’s article
Senator Arlen Specter is quoted as saying: “'We ought to get to the
bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people,’ said
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, on April 9. ‘[T]he President of the United States
owes a specific explanation to the American people … about exactly what
he did.’”

If Senator Specter really believed the president owes the American people an
explanation, maybe he wouldn’t have scheduled Senator Russ Feingold’s
hearing on censure on a Friday. That’s not exactly a day to get full attendance.
To my personal disgust, many Democrats didn’t even bother to show up.
Friday is get away day and Specter knew it. His disingenuousness runs just shy
of the deep hypocrisy in his statement.

What Bernstein suggests will not give any comfort to true Bush haters who want
his head no matter how it’s gotten. Bernstein reminds us that the Senate
Watergate Committee was created by a vote of 77-0 in the Senate. If an investigation
into Bush, beyond censure and impeachment considerations, is to be conducted,
Bernstein continues, “It must not be a fishing expedition…”
That’s not likely to be possible. But Berstein makes a powerful case in
his Vanity Fair piece that full investigations into the behavior of
President Bush and his administration are not only important, but critical to
our country.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party today is so weak, so ethically
challenged, so lacking in morals and integrity that Republican members of Congress,
Senate and House, are willing to go to any lengths to save George W. Bush, even
if it means destroying this country, our reputation around the world, as well
as the United States military that Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld use like
slaves in a war that has no honorable way out, as if by design.

In Watergate, Republicans were the ones
who finally told Richard Nixon, “Enough.” They were the ones who
cast the most critical votes for articles of impeachment, ensuring that Nixon
would be judged with nonpartisan fairness. After the vote, the Republican
congressional leadership—led by the great conservative senator Barry
Goldwater—marched en masse to the White House to tell the criminal president
that he had to go. And if he didn’t, the leadership would recommend
his conviction in the Senate and urge all their Republican colleagues to do
the same.

In the case of George W. Bush, important
conservative and Republican voices have, finally, begun speaking out in the
past few weeks. William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the modern conservative
movement and, with Goldwater, perhaps its most revered figure, said last month:
“It’s important that we acknowledge in the inner counsels of state
that [the war in Iraq] has failed so that we should look for opportunities
to cope with that failure.” And “Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune
that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq.… If he’d invented
the Bill of Rights it wouldn’t get him out of this jam.” And “The
neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic
responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a
free country.”

Even more scathing have been some officials
who served in the White House under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s
father. … (Carl
Bernstein)

There was a time in this country when people, including our politicians, were
capable of putting country before political party. In George W. Bush’s
Republican Party, those days are gone.