The Media Case for Impeachment

At the risk of being accused of being a pointy-headed liberal college professor, I point your attention to Lewis Lapham's buzz-generating piece in the latest number of Harper's, "The Case for Impeachment."

Here we're less concerned with the politics of impeachment -- if you're interested in that stuff, I point you here, and here, and here -- and more with what is the proper role of the media in keeping the pressure on the Bushies in prosecuting a war that is likely to supplant the Civil War, World War I and Vietnam as the most divisive war in the nation's history.

Lapham, long a critic of sycophantic media coverage of Bush, particularly the failure of the press to expose the administration's deceptions prior to the invasion of Iraq three years ago, sets out a detailed bill of particulars on the administration's abuses and wonders why the press is only now discovering that there may be impeachable offenses in play here. He points specifically to the staff investigation of Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee:

The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years—misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.—but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?

Without getting into whether the president should be impeached or not (I don't know that there can be anything other than the usual 51-49 split on this), it does strike me as odd that Bush supporters can't see beyond their argument that opposition to the president and his undermining of the Constitution is motivated by nothing more than hatred of Bush and lack of patriotism by liberals.

The Lapham piece is a good discussion starter than could get us to the merits as opposed to the ideology of a Bush impeachment. The Web version of the piece is only excerpted at the Harper's Web site; you'll have to go to a bookstore of the library to see the whole piece.