Kucinich: "Taking impeachment off the table is a big mistake"

Julia Reynolds reports in the Monterey Herald, "Kucinich pushes Bush impeachment":

He seized the moment to come out with perhaps his strongest stance to date toward impeaching President George W. Bush.

"I'm going to talk to members of Congress this week and tell them taking impeachment off the table is a big mistake," he said.

Kucinich was moved to take action, he said, in part because of Bush's recent suggestion to reporters that a world war with Iran might be imminent, leading Kucinich to wonder "whether he's playing with Armageddon or he's not well."

"The world can't countenance the president of the United States raising the specter of World War III," he said. "A president must be temperate with his words."

Cheney '94 versus Cheney '03:This is your brain on oil

A Dick Cheney interview from 1994, when he was with the American Enterprise Institute, has been getting a lot of attention since it was posted by Grand Theft Country on YouTube in August.

In case you haven't seen it yet, or you're masochistic enough to enjoy listening to Cheney speak, here is the video:



Here is the transcript:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

A YouTube visitor asked:

Why did they do this if they already knew how bad it was going to be?

Is it just because of oil, or defense contracts? If so, then why didn't they just bring in more troops?

This video is very telling about the lack of character of the VP and others, and removes the possibility that they were just wrong or ignorant of the likely outcome, but raises more questions about what the actual goal must have been.

To take this line of reasoning a bit further, what if Cheney came to appreciate what chaos in Iraq would do for the oil business, not to mention defense contractors? What happened between 1994 and 2003 that could have led Cheney to change his position so radically?

• He joined the American Enterprise Institute.
  
• From 1995 until 2000, he served as CEO of Halliburton.
  
• In 1997, along with Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and other neocons, he founded the "Project for the New American Century."

But getting in bed with the neocons and Big Oil probably weren't enough to completely change Cheney. I think we can safely assume that he stood with other notable neo-con PNAC comrades when they were making statements like these back in 1998:

Back in 1998, Richard Perle claimed that "It would be neither wise nor necessary for us to send ground forces into Iraq when patriotic Iraqis are willing to fight to liberate their own country." If the United States were "to give logistical support and military equipment to the opposition and to use airpower to defend it in the territory it controls," the result would be "a full-blown insurrection against Saddam."

Douglas Feith argued then that "It is by no means certain that the various elements of Iraq's army would fight well, or, in some cases, at all if the US showed determination to delegitimate Saddam and to create exclusion areas to be placed under Iraqi opposition control, defended with US-supplied anti-tank weapons, and protected by the US Air Force and, only if necessary, by US ground forces."

And Paul Wolfowitz sounded a somewhat more cautious note but still scoffed at the idea that the United States would have to overthrow Saddam by itself: "I don't believe that it's as hard as it is made to sound. Maybe it's not as simple as it sometimes sounds, but it's certainly not as hard as [Clinton administration National Security Adviser] Sandy Berger makes it sound when he talks about a major land invasion of Iraq. I know there are differences between Iraq and [Soviet-era] Afghanistan, but I think it is relevant to point out that we overthrew the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan without a single American ground troop; as a matter of fact, without a single American pilot."

If Cheney changed his mind sometime between 1998 and 2003, what could have changed it?

• Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi had Cheney's ear, promising him that US troops would be met with roses, not IEDs.
  
• In 2000, Cheney had his fourth heart attack.

Or maybe being in the oil business changed his mind. Which brings us to the second question, "why didn't they just bring in more troops?" This assumes that stability was a goal or that we wanted Iraq's oil. What if Iraq's oil is more valuable left in the ground? Greg Palast writes:

The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraqi's hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq's oil flow - the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion. And it has been darn effective. Iraq's output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program. Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002. That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil's profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.

Thank God for the (Bluegrass) Republicans!

Part 12 in a series

Golden Gate Park in San Francisco will be Mecca for bluegrass music fans (and anyone who loves good music) at the 7th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival this weekend.

Last year saw 750,000 fans attend over three days, thanks to the world class entertainers on the lineup and the price of tickets: FREE.

Thank financier Warren Hellman for footing the bill. He was a Republican for 52 years before starting the festival, but no longer after hanging out with the likes of Steve Earle.

Steve Earle, a featured performer since 2002, calls the festival a highlight of his year. Earle, known for his political rants against war and the death penalty, said he doesn't have many friends in finance, particularly ones like Hellman with Republican backgrounds.

"He's the kind of capitalist that I at least understand," said Earle, 52, from his home near Nashville, Tennessee. "He really believes that what he's doing is to the benefit of everybody."

Hellman & Friedman owns Internet advertising company DoubleClick Inc., which Google Inc. has agreed to buy for $3.1 billion. The firm bought software maker Kronos Inc. this year and co-owns hedge-fund manager Gartmore Investment Management Plc.

Sponsoring the event in a city with five times more Democrats than Republicans has changed Hellman, Holliday said.

"He went from a Republican, suit-wearing downtown icon to a leftish, Green Party hippie in seven years," she said.

Hellman said he now is registered to vote with no party affiliation, after being a Republican for 52 years.

"The festival had something to do with it," he said. "You can't help but be affected by a lot of the people you spend a lot of time with."

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass kicks off this afternoon with Buddy Miller, T Bone Burnett & Friends (John Mellencamp, Neko Case, & Doyle Bramhall II) and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.

Free Burma!

The latest from the BBC:

Scores of Burmese have been arrested overnight, as the country's military continues its crackdown following last week's protests, witnesses say.

Security forces are said to be using recordings of the demonstrations to compile lists of activists for arrest.

A source has told the BBC that as many as 10,000 people - many of them monks who led the demos - have been rounded up for interrogation in recent days.

The body of a Japanese reporter killed during the protests has arrived home.

Bush Blows Tobacco

As you've no doubt heard or recall from my post in August, Congress passed legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, by $35 billion over five years via a 61-cent increase in tobacco taxes.

President Bush vetoed the bill today -- just the fourth veto of his presidency -- arguing that it was a middle-class entitlement and a step toward socialized medicine. Senator John McCain dug his political grave a little deeper by agreeing with Bush, saying: "Right call by the president."

Conservative columnist George Will argued, bizarrely, that the issue turned on one's concept of "freedom and equality ... conservatives favor freedom, which inevitably increases unequal social outcomes." No, I'm not making this shit up.

While most of the mainstream media reports on the political fallout, whether the move will hurt the GOP, and how the Democrats will respond, the American City Business Journals stated the issue clearly and succinctly:

  Bush veto gives victory to tobacco industry

I prefer my headline. Or maybe it should be, "Tobacco Blown by Bush?" I prefer the active voice.

As Eunice Moscos reports for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no one will believe that Republicans, drunk on government spending, have suddenly sobered up, as Bush suggests.

John Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College ... said that Republicans will have to explain why they are suddenly showing fiscal restraint after spending money "like drunken sailors."

"Democrats will ask why the GOP is suddenly sobering up when facing a program that helps poor Hispanic kids," he said.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made that point, saying that the money proposed for SCHIP under the legislation "is the equivalent of what the President spends in less than four months in Iraq."