Booman's question

By Libby

In light of Bush's admission, after years of denial of any knowledge of same, that sure he knew his most highly placed officials were plotting a course for institutionalized torture, Booman asks:

I hear John Conyers asked an assembled crowd today in Philadelphia whether any of them would object to impeaching the president. No one objected. Then he asked whether anyone would object to impeaching Cheney. Again, no one objected. I don't know the full context of Conyers' remarks, but the timing indicates it is related to Bush's admission.

If you were strategizing a blogswarm to get Congress, the press, and the administration to do something, what would you suggest we focus on? Should we focus on the lack of media coverage? Should we focus on getting a special prosecutor? Should we focus on getting the administration to comply with requests for documents and testimony from congressional committees?

Tristero thinks we'll never get a decent prosecutor as long as the GOP holds the reins at Justice, nor can we compel the White House to produce sufficient documents and that our time is better spent in reinforcing the narrative that this administration dragged us into a moral gutter by condoning and fully embracing torture.

I'm not sure what would be most effective but it occurs to me that taking it on in a multipronged attack that embraces all those tactics and framing it within the context of impeachment would be good. Even at this late date, I think impeachment is our best safeguard against any further insane military actions, such as an attack on Iran which the White House still clearly desires and I would think it would be our best bet to pry documents from these thugs.

As Avedon notes, the executive privilege defense doesn't work in impeachment hearings and there is no rule that says the impeachment proceedings can't go on even after the miscreants have left office.

Comments

[Dan]

Hi Libby. I've posted this elsewhere too: What we do is stay on the topic to the exclusion of everything else. I've tried to do that at Pruning Shears. If we're serious we should take the "No Primary Pledge". For God's sake stop contributing to the Clinton/Obama drama. Every word we write on it gives aid and comfort to the horserace paradigm. I've seen a lot of hand wringing over it on the left-leaning blogs but every word posted on it dignifies the talking heads. We might not be able to change them but surely we can change ourselves.

[Libby]

Hey Dan. Great point. I've been trying to stay out of the back and forth on the race myself, with varying levels of success, but we also agreed here that we're going to stop feeding the horserace narrative and focus on the GOP, McCain and the present administration.

I thought that was the point of Leftopia in the first place.

[Dan]

And if I may humbly suggest something, I recommend we change the way we refer to our country's stance on torture.