The Bush-worshiping boys over at Powerline wallow in this gross intellectual dishonesty more frequently and more transparently than just about anyone else around.
This morning, John (the one with the Rocket obsession), commented on the just-released Eleanor Clift column in Newsweek, in which Clift reported on burgeoning speculation in Washington that Bush could face impeachment if it is proven that the Administration knowingly lied about pre-war intelligence in order to lure Americans into supporting the war in Iraq.
The Power Rocket proclaims today that he is disgusted by this "flight of fancy," and he scorns what he calls "the far left's dream of regaining power." This is because the Power Rocket finds talk of impeachment outright offensive because -- get this -- impeachment is so very anti-democratic. He thus spits out this oh-so-principled argument:
As usual, the left's preferred approach doesn't involve the inconvenient necessity of actually winning an election.
This is the kind of thing I really don’t get. When Rocket Boy says stuff like this, does he just block out of his mind the fact that the GOP tried to dislodge the highly popular and twice-elected Bill Clinton from office using this same device of impeachment? When the GOP was holding its Monica impeachment trial, were Rocket and his Power buddies decrying that spectacle as an anti-democratic effort to nullify two elections? Do you even need to hear from him in order to know the answer to that? (See UPDATE below if you want the painfully predictable answer).
This is the type of outright corruption that makes wallowing in hard-core partisan "debate" so draining and depressing. There is no shame and, worse, there is no obligation to operate under even a pretense of intellectual honesty.
As a result, we get "arguments" like this:
(1) It is an honorable and legitimate exercise of Constitutional power to impeach an overwhelmingly popular, twice-elected President because he lied in an ultimately-dismissed civil lawsuit about whether he had an extra marital affair, but . . .
(2) It is horribly un-democratic to impeach an overwhelmingly unpopular President if it is proven that he deliberately lied to American citizens in order to trick them into supporting a war he wanted to wage.
If it is demonstrated that the Administration deliberately and knowingly lied about (or severely exaggerated) intelligence in the run-up to the war -- and, at this point, that is still an "if" -- then nobody who supported the Clinton impeachment can argue that impeachment itself is undemocratic. At least nobody who wants to be at least a little bit intellectually honest can do that.
After all, the GOP, unable to defeat Clinton in two national elections (or even to dent his popularity among Americans), were the ones who took the impeachment weapon out of the bag. As a result, they cannot be heard to argue that the weapon which they so gleefully fired less than 10 years ago as part of some sex scandal is now some sort of illegitimate anti-democratic tool of tyranny.
But people like PowerJohn will argue exactly that, because intellectual honesty is the last thing they care about.
UPDATE: Via Eric Muller at Is that Legal?, here is what Rocket John and his PowerFriend, Scott, had to say on December 17, 1998 -- 2 days before the House voted to impeach Clinton:
Like many others, we have been frustrated by the apparent inability of much of the American public to take the Clinton scandals seriously. "It's not about sex," we have patiently repeated to our benighted friends. "It's about perjury. It's about obstruction of justice. The sex is only incidental. At most it was the motive for the crimes. You wouldn't think murder was unimportant just because the motive for the murder was sex, would you?" So goes our argument.
How odd that John wasn't railing against impeachment back in 1998 by complaining that the GOP's "preferred approach doesn't involve the inconvenient necessity of actually winning an election." And yet now, here he is in 2005, saying exactly that about the prospect of impeachment. I wonder what accounts for his radically changed feelings about impeachment?
Sort of like it was a terrible thing for Lewis Libby to be indicted for perjury when there was supposedly no underlying crime, but it was a great thing for Clinton to be impeached over perjury when there was no underlying crime.
ReplyDeleteNo shame is right.
I do not think it has been conclusively established yet -- certainly not nearly sufficiently to justify the draconian act of impeachment -- that the Administration knew the pre-war WMD claims it was making were false, as opposed to genuinely (but erroneously) believing the bad intelligence it got from the CIA. Now that there will be a real examination of that question, we will finally know, soon enough.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that it's somewhere in the middle - they got intelligence hyping the WMD threat because that's the intelligence they wanted (and thereby caused to be produced), and they wanted that intelligence to be produced because they believed there was enough of a risk of WMDs in Iraq to justify a war.
If the Administration was simply mistaken in its judgment, that is obviously not grounds for impeachment. Impeachment is only for high crimes and misdemeanors, not incompetence. That's what elections are for.
Well put Glenn. Of course the rightwing blogs will not allow comments such as yours so their readers never hear dissenting voices (another un-democratic principle).
ReplyDeleteBut I'm with you on the ability to prove out and out deception on the part of the administration, and I also doubt the ability of left-wing readers to give this issue the fair hearing it really needs. An impeachment, though perhaps necessary if this intelligence truly was massaged (and is thus a war crime), will hurt our nation in many ways.
As for the evidencce, haven't several commissions already ruled on the fudged intelligence before?
FYI, QandO caught HindBoy on his lack of intellectual honesty regarding perjury and all that awhile back. Read and weep here.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/2005/10/that_was_now_th.html
You're forgetting that right-wingers don't think Bill Clinton "actually won an election," because, in his two three-way races, he never got more than 50% of the popular vote.
ReplyDeleteThey stopped saying that at the drop of a hat after November 2000, but they still believe it.
the evidence is coming to light regarding the deliberate lying to the public and congress to start the war with iraq. read this post here.
ReplyDeleteI do not think it has been conclusively established yet -- certainly not nearly sufficiently to justify the draconian act of impeachment -- that the Administration knew the pre-war WMD claims it was making were false, as opposed to genuinely (but erroneously) believing the bad intelligence it got from the CIA.
ReplyDeleteYou mean apart from the fact that they had to set up their own office to funnel bad information up seperate from the CIA, who disagreed with the conclusions they wished to reach?
Read this, Glenn.
Sven & Phoenecian - I don't want to be in the position of defending the Administration's pre-war conduct (who would?), but I do not think that the stove-pipeing activity proves that the Administration knew the intelligence was falsified. It may be evidence suggesting that they knew, but that is not necessarily the case.
ReplyDeleteFor better or worse, there have long been a group of people (now affectionately referred to as neo-cons) who vigorously believe that the CIA's threat assessments have been woefully conservative, causing the agency to underestimate national security threats around the world. The most convincing example cited in favor of that theory is the CIA's utter failure to sufficiently appreciate the threat of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation, but there are others.
Given that, the Defense Department and NSC neo-cons may very well have believed that stove-pipeing was the only way to ensure that accurate intelligence made its way out of the tepid bowels of the CIA.
I'm not arguing that the Administration was free of doubt about its WMD claims, and I don't think it's even reasonable to contest that they willingly exaggerated and hyped up what they knew in order to sell the war. That's pretty much indisputable at this point.
It's just that, unlike Johnny Rocket, I think impeachment is a very serious matter regardless of who the Presdient is, and it should be used only with conclusive evidence of clear criminal misconduct. That's a high standard to meet, and I'm just not yet convinced that the Administration generally, and even less so Bush specifically, knew -- as in knew with a good amount of certainty -- that the intelligence which they chose to believe was, in fact, false.
Sven & Phoenecian - I don't want to be in the position of defending the Administration's pre-war conduct (who would?), but I do not think that the stove-pipeing activity proves that the Administration knew the intelligence was falsified. It may be evidence suggesting that they knew, but that is not necessarily the case.
ReplyDeleteGlenn, the purpose of professional intelligence assessment is to prevent things like, say, going to war on false premises, murdering scores of thousands of foreigners, killing thousands of Americans and trashing America's reputation.
The Bush Administration deliberately bypassed established professional intelligence assessment.
There are three possibilities:
i, They knew it was a lie, in which case they should be impeached for criminal behaviour.
ii, They are fundamentally and completely incompetant, in which case they should be impeached on a misdemeanour and slung out as fast as possible before they do even more damage.
iii, Both of the above, to some extent.
Your choice - either Bush is a criminal liar or fatally incompetant. Either way, do you support keeping him in power?
Oh, and Glenn?
ReplyDeleteSee here...