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Local News & Opinion
Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 03.18 Pressure Drop: Brave Sir Dennis Ran Away 03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim 03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare! 03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm Media Watching
03.17 CNN Scrapes Bottom of Right-Wing Barrel With Erickson Hire 03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel 03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia 03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion 03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax 03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq 03.03 It's Snow News 03.03 The Woeful Washington Post Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution US Politics, Policy & Culture
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives" 03.09 Thinking About Countings 03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism 02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium High Crimes?
03.19 Israel's Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid 03.18 The Lawfare Project's Anti-Democratic Agenda 03.16 America's Secret Prisons 03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem 03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue 03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children 03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session 03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid 03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda 02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
03.19 The Growing Movement For Publicly-Owned Banks 03.19 America's "Houdini Recovery" under IMF-Type Austerity 03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network 03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource 03.05 Is the Recovery Real? 03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You 03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction" 03.01 Thinking About Fees International
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception 03.03 Muslim Disunity 03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation 02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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SECRET NEWS:A Popular Groundswell for Impeachment...there is virtually no coverage in the media of either the majority sentiment for removing Bush from office or even of the key issues that make this president a poster child for impeachment.
The prevailing "wisdom" of our corporate media is that impeachment of President Bush is a left-wing fantasy. As a result, there is virtually no coverage in the media of either the majority sentiment for removing Bush from office or even of the key issues that make this president a poster child for impeachment.Take the several polls by Zogby International on the impeachment issue. Last June, Zogby polled Americans across the country and found that some 42 percent favored impeaching the president if it were found that he had lied about the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an invasion. That is a higher percentage of people in favor of impeachment than there ever was for the impeachment of former president Bill Clinton during his entire impeachment ordeal. Yet the poll was not mentioned by any major media news organization. In November, Zogby repeated the poll. This time, 53 percent of respondents from all over the nation said they thought the president should be impeached and removed from office if he lied about the war. That poll to was totally blacked out. A third poll early this year found 52 percent of Americans saying Bush should be removed from office if he broke the law and had the National Security Agency spy on American citizens without court warrants. Well, of course he did do that-the president has admitted he did so and says he will continue to do it--so the latest poll was really saying that 52 percent of Americans think he should be sent packing. That poll too was largely ignored by the major corporate media. Left-wing fantasy? Are we saying that the majority of Americans are left-wingers? I don't think so. But the media are not the only ones who are trying to dismiss popular sentiment for impeachment. The leadership of the Democratic Party is doing the same thing. While researching our book on impeachment (The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing George W. Bush from Office, St. Martin's Press, due out in late April), my co-author Barbara Olshanshky and I have found that members of Congress-even firebrands like Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)-have been strong-armed behind the scenes by the Democratic National Committee not to introduce an impeachment bill in the House. Rep. John Conyers, the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, where such a bill would be considered, has submitted three bills that relate to impeachment-a proposal for a special committee to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the administration and bills to censure both the president and the vice president for refusing to answer questions from Congress on impeachment-related issues--but that's as far as the Democratic congressional leadership is willing to go. As the Wall Streeet Journal reported in a March 6 article on the impeachment issue, Democratic Party leaders fear that party support for impeachment could lead to a backlash as happened to Republicans who supported Clinton's impeachment. This is of course nonsense. The effort to impeach Clinton over his sexual escapades was always viewed by the majority of Americans, Democratic and Republican alike, as a farce and an embarrassment. As the Wall Street Journal notes, support for Clinton's impeachment never rose much above a quarter of the electorate--the hard right element of the Republican Party. The issues that are driving popular sentiment for Bush's impeachment are much more serious:
The polls showing majority support for impeachment make it clear that the public knows all this intuitively, even though people have to get their information from personal observation, from the Internet, or by reading between the lines, because the media are more focused on the Oscars and the latest dramatic murder or kidnapping, and even though the supposed opposition party, for the most part, is afraid of its own shadow. The prevailing wisdom is that all such talk about impeachment is fantasy, and yet out in the country, some candidates are finding that calling for impeachment brings down the house. If those candidacies catch fire, and pro-impeachment candidates backed by groups like ImpeachPAC start winning Democratic primaries in late spring, and if those candidates go on to win seats in Congress in November, I am predicting that their spineless colleagues will realize that the public wants action on all these issues, not just business as usual. With the American public so on edge about so many issues, it might, in the end, not take that many radical upsets in November to create a whole new mood in Congress. Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book, "The Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is due out May 1. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com Copyright © 2006 The Baltimore Chronicle.
All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on March 10, 2006. |
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