George McGovern Calls For Impeachment

In Sunday's Washington Post, former US Representative, Senator, WWII veteran, and 1972 Democratic nominee for President George McGovern wrote an op-ed calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Excerpts from:
Why I Believe George Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

...American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law...

...Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster [New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina] in U.S. history.

...Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

This case has been made before (not by those in the Democratic leadership, unfortunately) but it's nice to hear it from someone who lived through and was very close to Watergate.

Of course McGovern was swiftboated in 1972 as well. The ghoul that never dies wrote during the 1972 campaign that an unnamed democratic senator told him, "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot," the Senator said. "Once middle America - Catholic middle America, in particular - finds this out, he’s dead."

McGovern never shook the label of candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid" and lost in a landslide. The intrepid reporter who wrote the story? Bob "Nosferatu" Novak.