A Patriot Would Have to Say Impeach

Forget all the years of suspecting that liberal antiwar protesters not-so-secretly hated America. Forget the years of thinking that whenever some wingnut on the television was calling Bush a liar that the wingnut was actually the liar and it was all just politics as usual. Forget every time you gave Bush the benefit of a doubt on the war.
It’s official: he was lying.
Last week two major clarifications were made regarding the record of veracity when it comes to George W. Bush. Former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, dropped his bombshell in his new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. In no uncertain terms McClellan explains that the build-up to Iraq was a propaganda program knowingly based on lies, deceptions, and distortions. The guy who actually did the lying has come out and detailed the whole plan.
There never needed to be an Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis did not have to die. Our children did not have to learn the words Abu Ghraib, or Fallujah, or hear of Korans thrown in toilets. We did not have to determine our own feelings about waterboarding or what the tolerable level of sexual harassment is for private contractors in a war zone.
But wait there’s more: Also June 5, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued their official report insisting “top administration officials engaged in a deliberate, systematic and sustained propaganda campaign to manufacture support for the unnecessary, unjustified and illegal invasion of Iraq.”
Let me say that again: It’s official, he was lying. There’s a lot of you out there who owe Scott Ridder, Joseph Wilson, Ray McGovern, William Fallon, Richard Clarke and millions of protesters around the world an apology.
It’s true. All of those people who have been telling you Bush was lying, that the war is based on lies, 935 of them officially, they weren’t hurting our country, those patriots were trying to save it.
In the words of the Baltimore Sun’s Michael J. Marsalek “Such behavior must not go unpunished in a nation of laws.” We cannot ignore that our country has been intentionally deceived into taking a brutally wrong path. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a crime. The only moral option is impeach.
The people who insist that they care about this country, that doing what is right matters to them must now address this terrible wrong that has been foisted on our country, if we the people of the United States are to have a country of law, a country that earns respect in the world.
Starting now, the GOP or anyone else who chooses to champion Bush must cede the position of moral authority, for they are, in effect, consciously championing the sale and further manufacture of these lies, particularly the supposed Christian Religious Right of the Republican Party. At a very basic fundamental level, supporting the ideals of Christianity and the Bush agenda are, as liberals have long claimed, a contradiction in terms.
People who claim to support a Prince of Peace and a message of mercy are then forced to also endorse Black Sites, Black Water, and Extreme Rendition? Any person who would claim to be a Christian in the first place would have to condemn the idea of war in general and in particular this Bush War in Iraq on very basic moral grounds. Christians are supposed to be opposed to murder, torture, theft, deceptions, all of which have been hallmarks of the Bush administration.
Again and again American indignation has found a way to focus on some Democratic peccadilloes and buy into the false morality that sex is worst than violence. But where once or twice individual Democrats have unfortunately screwed one or two willing participants, the Bush regime has continually screwed millions at home and billions aboard, despite our pleas for mercy.
Of course mercy is a Christian value, one Bush has repeatedly, proudly dismissed as weakness. No wonder these days George Bush is less popular than dental plaque. If you’re OK with killing people for a lie, destroying the homes of millions, maiming and crippling then abandoning tens of thousands of our own soldiers, squandering trillions and raping our social services, all for a lie, then I guess you might still support Bush, but what kind of a person would you be? Not a Christian, and not a patriot.
It’s time to impeach. Call, write, do something.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of Arizona