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i do not see the logic here, mr. mephisto.
there are, it seems to me, two problems: the one (dissolutions of responsibility for this war) is linkable (but not necessarily so) to the other (question of impeachment).
when i used the word impeachment earlier, i did so with specific reference to the emergence of new, extensive documentation about this administrations policies of torture, its extent, its administrative reach, etc...ther eshould be political hell to pay for this administration on the second. there should be political hell to pay for this administration on the first as well, but it is more complicated.
to back up:
how does the fact that the fabricated-ness of the wmd claims have been revealed repeatedly since the period before bushwar got underway function to make these problems ok?
how is this not simply repeating one of the administrations main claims to legitimate its own conduct? "ah well, poo poo, we have known about this for a while now"--does that not seem a bit surreal to you?
this kind of move is purest damage control. i am surprised to read/hear folk recapitulate it as if it reflected upon questions of substance. i imagine there was serious political hardball played to prevent this from coming out too officially before the election.
conservative ideology has sold itself on the basis of personal responsibility, whatever that means (it is a code term that as often means let the poor die as it does anything ethical)....now you have the spectacle of the bush administration, which has used this trope of personal responsibility to construct something of a Leader cult for television purposes, trying to evade responsibility by any means necessary. the problem is not cowboy goerge and his band of mayberry machiavellians--it is faulty intelligence---the problem is not the particular agenda of the neocons within this administration, but universal. "everyone," they are now saying, was fooled by the same data. that is empirically false. what is its function? to dissolve blame. nothing more, nothing less.
on the other, you have a politics of the individual, of the Leader, within which the Leader's subjective relations to the world operate as structuring of politics (the discourse of resoluteness and other, lovely, resonant terms drawn from the late 1930s in europe)...how do you square the two? how are you to trust the "leadership" that might be possible for the bush administration given the debacle that is this war? why would you do it? what possible basis would you have?
it is almost as if the karlrove machinery is making arguments that would dissolve the question of impeachment as part of thier public strategy. the defense you would get is that you are seeing now.
it seems that the matter of sanctioning torture is different, in that it is a crime against humanity. that can, and should, be an impeachable offense. god knows it is far far more serious than a blowjob. i do not think that the matter of impeachment should be eliminated by calculations like the above, that you would end up with cheney. i think it is a matter of holding bush to account for his actions.
it would be a shame indeed to have this administration, which talks ad nauseum about the question of democracy, demonstrate what it really means--that the people are free one day every four years and then in a mediated manner--and that apart from that one day, anything goes--unless of course you are not a conservative.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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