There isn't any other way to describe it. It is, as far as the future is concerned, one or the other.
There are alternatives to impeachment - war crimes trials, truth and reconciliation commissions - but the former raises the spector of Nuremburg and the latter skips punishment or any sort of accountability. That the president who made mincemeat of the Constitution and advocated torture - never mind everything else he did - should escape accountability of any sort for what he and his administration did is simply unacceptable. Digby explains why.
This is another edition of "when you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again." In this case, it's literally true. The worst decision Bill Clinton ever made was letting Iran-Contra slide in the name of healing and "getting things done." He got impeached for his trouble and these people came back and perpetrated the Greatest Strategic Blunder In Modern Memory.
The SSCI waited until nearly the end of Bush's term to bring this up in order that it be relegated to the "healing" file and nobody ever pays the price. It's how the establishment protects itself. (See: Libby, Scooter.) Maybe somebody thinks we can just wait for Michael Ledeen to die. But there is a whole new generation weaned on conservative movement tactics and they will keep the zombie alive until they get their next chance unless it's stopped once and for all.
In a comment to "President Obama and Paying the Citizens' Rent", jumped-up monkey wrote:
IMO, it goes back to Gerry Ford, who stuck a band-aid on the Nixon wound and called it a healing. Now, generations later, we see the puss is still oozing out--Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc.
Digby points to the way all the neocon criminals who perpetrated the Iran-Contra mess showed up again in the Bush administration to help Doug Feith go around the Congress like they did.
They're both right. I've been saying it for years and I really wish somebody would listen: YOU CANNOT NEGOTIATE WITH THESE PEOPLE, AND UNLESS THEY ARE PUNISHED THEY WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.
Digby, in a postscript, links to Richard Clarke, who thinks there ought to be a T&R (Truth and Reconciliation) Commission established, so heinous are the crimes.
“Someone should have to pay in some way for the decisions that they made to mislead the American people,” said Clarke. He suggested that “some sort of truth and reconciliation commission” might be appropriate because, he said, we can’t “let these people back into polite society”:
CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.
Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grieviously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.
She favors a war crimes tribunal instead. I favor both a tribunal and the impeachment of Bush and Cheney because they are precisely who the Founders were thinking of when they wrote the impeachment articles. Glenn Greenwald seems to agree, incensed that impeachment has been "taken off the table" by the Democrats, which allows right-wing propaganda artists like David Broder, who screamed for Clinton's blood in the 90's for the sake of "honor", to dismiss Bush's lies and authoritarianism as "policy disputes."
No matter how many times one sees it, it will never cease to amaze that the exact same media mavens who righteously strutted around demanding that Bill Clinton be impeached or forced to resign because the "honor" of our political system demanded that, continue casually to dismiss every crime of the last seven years as nothing more than a garden-variety, good faith "policy dispute" which only shrill rabble want to see "turned into a criminal or impeachable affair." So the Senate issues a report documenting that the President and Vice President repeatedly made false statements to induce the citizenry to support a war against another country that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead for no reason -- added on to the piles of outright lawbreaking under this administration -- and to David Broder, those are just mere "policy disputes" which (unlike Bill Clinton's grave crimes) merit no punishment.
Unless we want to be seeing this again, living through this again in 20 years, we have to establish strong boundaries and even stronger consequences. If we do not, we will not get our democracy back - ever - and we will not deserve to.
PUT IMPEACHMENT BACK ON THE TABLE.
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