Could Bush Be Impeached?
No less than the Economist (albeit in a very short item) says local impeachment initiatives in liberal US enclaves could ultimately gather steam:
Berkeley’s move has caused much ridicule on conservative TV channels, yet a grassroots movement of sorts is developing. Last year the Centre for Constitutional Rights laid out its legal case against the president: spying on American citizens, lying to them about the Iraq war, seizing undue executive power and sending people to be tortured overseas. Now the centre and a dozen other organisations have teamed up for a “National Teach-In”, starting on July 19th. Meetings will feature a short film called “How to Impeach a President”.
A few Democrats in Congress are talking of censure and investigations, and popular momentum, if it gets going, could make them bolder. Moreover, state resolutions may have bite.
In related King George-bashing news, check out David Remnick’s recent New Yorker column about the Bush administration’s Nixonian disdain for the media.
In the era of the Pentagon Papers, a war-weary White House went to the courts to stifle the press. You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.
(New Yorker link via.)
UPDATE: I’ve thought about this some more, and it strikes me as odd that on the one hand the Bush administration outwardly has such a low opinion of so-called “elite” media outlets, and yet on the other hand Bush ideologues have — and let’s give credit where credit is due — absolutely mastered the craft of using rhetoric in public debate.
I did a little digging and came across two illuminating interviews (part 1 and part 2) with Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff. They’re a couple of years old but still germane. Lakoff describes the way the conservative intellectual establishment has “framed” the issues, while liberals have not been sufficiently interested in such rhetorical endeavors.
Think about some of the conservative catch-phrases that have become part of our lexicon: “war on terror” (terror being an emotional state as opposed to a real-world enemy that can actually be defeated), “death tax,” (i.e. the estate tax), and my personal favorite, the almost comically-loaded “weapons of mass destruction” (formerly known as unconventional weapons).
Providing this kind of linguistic context is smart; liberals have a lot of catching up to do. Here’s Lakoff on how progressives should have framed the issue of gay marriage:
Or take gay marriage, which the right has made a rallying topic. Surveys have been done that say Americans are overwhelmingly against gay marriage. Well, the same surveys show that they also overwhelmingly object to discrimination against gays. These seem to be opposite facts, but they’re not. “Marriage” is about sex. When you say “gay marriage,” it becomes about gay sex, and approving of gay marriage becomes implicitly about approving of gay sex. And while a lot of Americans don’t approve of gay sex, that doesn’t mean they want to discriminate against gay people. Perfectly rational position. Framed in that way, the issue of gay marriage will get a lot of negative reaction. But what if you make the issue “freedom to marry,” or even better, “the right to marry”? That’s a whole different story. Very few people would say they did not support the right to marry who you choose. But the polls don’t ask that question, because the right wing has framed that issue.