ONCE WE WERE THE GOOD GUYS. WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO CHANGE THAT?

by Alex Bennett
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE February 2010

A few months back I was watching one of those contentious town hall meetings. I can’t remember the congressman who was holding it, but I can remember the endless parade of mindless assholes reciting what they had heard on right-wing radio and TV talk shows. All I could think was, Where is the exit to this country?

I grew up in the ’40s and ’50s. My life was that of a suburban kid with a mom and pop, a cat, a dog and a bike that wheeled me around my naive and cloistered world. America had just come out of the Great Depression, and that made the nation more conscious of another person’s plight. Americans had witnessed suffering every time they passed a bread line or saw a homeless person on the street. Most Americans of that era knew they were just a paycheck away from being in the same boat.

Then came the Second World War. I remember seeing those Gold Stars in windows, signaling that the family had lost a son or daughter. People in the neighborhood would do what they could to honor and comfort them.We understood the need for individual sacrifice to protect the nation as a whole.

Even so, segregation prevailed beyond the walls of my pretty and neat world, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was taking aim at imaginary Communists.

I was luckier than most. My parents were very hip. Dad was a musician, and both he and Mom were bohemians. Some of the people who came into our home were the very people Congress wanted put away. My parents weren’t Communists, just real lefties. Yet the conservatives of that time would probably have called me a “Red Diaper Baby.”

I remember my father taking me down to City Hall when the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings in San Francisco. We were standing out front with other good Americans to protest the idea of our country being overrun by jackbooted witchhunters. One time I snuck into the hearing and watched as one of my favorite radio personalities, a guy who told charming stories about San Francisco, had his life ruined with one simple question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” The next morning I turned on the radio, but he wasn’t there. I was 15, and it was indelibly etched in my brain forever: They took him off the air!

I think this is when we started to lose our cherry. We were becoming paranoid, looking for evildoers in every shadow.

The Korean War wasn’t exactly the most ignoble of conflicts, but by the time we got to Vietnam, our imperialist impulses were in full flower. The only saving grace: Some Americans were vehemently opposing the war. There was still hope that good would triumph as people used their voices and bodies to protest the conflict in Southeast Asia. Eventually they chased a President from office. Once again we could look at the world with a sense of pride.

But even as we were patting ourselves on the back, a former die-hard leftist—who was mobbed up, had cheated on his first wife, ratted on his friends and, worst of all, was an actor—became President of the United States. Ronald Reagan created a supreme culture of selfishness and nationalism masquerading as conservatism. Since then, it’s been all downhill. Even the Clinton years didn’t stop the greed and dirty tricks that gained even more momentum under the Bushies.

All of a sudden, America was believing the poison spewed by right-wing radio talk show hosts. The Big Lie became the Big Truth. America had dumbed down. Oh, I know what you’re saying: “We elected Obama, didn’t we?” Sure, we did, because we succumbed to another Big Lie. He was going to change things, right? So what, exactly, has changed? Each passing day he stabs us in the back.

Look at us. We have become a country of selfish people. People who couldn’t care less about their neighbors. People who have long forgotten what right and wrong are. We have become a nation hypnotized by the media to believe whatever they tell us.

Worst of all, we live under the mistaken impression that America is the greatest country in the world when in fact that ended years ago. Today we are falling apart at the seams. Capitalism is devouring itself and our humanity. Morality has vanished.

How can we put the brakes on this downward slide to oblivion? I don’t know. Back in the days of my youth we were the good guys. Am I being too old-fashioned to want that back?

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Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, currently calls Sirius Left 146 his radio home.

You may purchase the hard copy of the February 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

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THE GOP’S JIHAD AGAINST SCIENCE
by Chris Mooney

FOR SIX YEARS OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION, the scientific community has been repeatedly disdained, and the bullshitters ascendant. The Bush regime has not only politicized the Justice Department—as with the firings of at least eight U.S. Attorneys—but also politicized science.

It began early on when Bush, asserting that our knowledge about global warming was “incomplete,” rejected the Kyoto Protocol. Then he announced a truly bizarre policy for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, the major hot-button political issue in the days prior to 9/11. Bush’s decision, made before he had even named his Presidential science adviser, was premised on the false “fact” that more than 60 preexisting cell lines would be eligible for federal funding even if Bush blocked funding for research on any new lines after that. But there weren’t nearly so many lines, and those that did exist were genetically limited, contaminated and had various other attributes that made them undesirable for scientific study.

Understandably annoyed by this kind of crap, scientists grew even more worried as the President left key science posts empty. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—two megagovernment agencies employing hordes of scientists—were stumbling around leaderless for a year. Bush delayed just as long in appointing a Surgeon General.

Then the real nonsense started. Although few have ever heard of them, it turns out that there are literally hundreds of committees, comprised of scientists and other experts, that advise our massive government on all kinds of technical subjects. Most of these committees are so obscure that apparently no one had thought to politicize them before the Bush Administration came along. It took true innovation (along with a certain measure of control-freakery) to interfere with this small army of nerds and technocrats.

One area where the Bush Administration messed with the scientists involved sex. Many of the President’s Christian Right supporters oppose sex before marriage. (Some probably oppose it after as well.) They also like to claim that virtually any form of contraception, or even information about contraception, encourages youthful promiscuity—rather than, say, protect kids who are going to screw around anyway. So they quickly got to work messing with an advisory committee that makes decisions regarding reproductive health drugs.

That included Plan B—the so-called “morning after” pill. It’s a form of emergency contraception that, if taken quickly after sex, can prevent unwanted pregnancy and therefore a large number of abortions.

Christian conservatives hate abortions; yet paradoxically, because of their discomfort with sex, they also hate Plan B. So the Bush Administration installed on the committee its favorite gynecologist, W. David Hager, author of a book titled As Jesus Cared for Women.  After the experts deliberated, they voted 23-4 that Plan B should be available over the counter. But the highly politicized FDA rejected their view, opting instead for Hager’s minority position on the matter. Later, Hager credited God with helping him to block wider availability of Plan B.

For right-wing Christians, when it comes to deterring women from having abortions, fear is the leading tactic. This inevitably involves more bullshit: claims that having an abortion will make you go crazy, give you breast cancer, etc.

Under the Bush Administration, once again, this kind of stuff actually got a hearing. A government document suggested that abortion might indeed increase a woman’s risk of contracting breast cancer later in life (although the vast majority of experts think otherwise). At least, in this case, reality did ultimately prevail: The document eventually got changed back, as not even the Bushies could justify so indefensible a statement for very long.

During Congressional hearings in July 2007, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified that his report on global health concerns was tampered with. Carmona’s original draft stressed the role of condoms in AIDS prevention, but William Steiger—a Bush appointee in the Department of Health and Human Services— sent the then-Surgeon General a memo. Steiger told Carmona to add to his report praise for Bush’s purported efforts to both curb AIDS in Third World countries and to improve public health in Afghanistan and Iraq. The HHS never released Carmona’s report, which also denounced violence against women and pollution, but had failed to ballyhoo Bush.

If possible, the administration’s distortions were still more egregious in the realm of climate science. There seemed to be a government- wide strategy of tinkering and meddling with scientific reports about global warming so as to keep the issue off the table and prevent pressure on the President to seriously address it. At one point the White House so heavily edited a government environmental report that the technocrats had to drop the global warming section entirely, rather than mislead the public.

In another case the executive branch had a lawyer named Philip Cooney—who had no scientific credentials, but had previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute [the oil industry's most influential lobbying organization]— editing the language of scientific documents pertaining to global warming. Needless to say, Cooney emphasized how uncertain everything was. Later, after his edits were revealed, he moved on to work for ExxonMobil. Talk about conflicts of interest.

And even as government scientific reports were getting the red-pen treatment, climate scientists working for the government were, at times, being blocked from talking to the press. Perhaps the most famous case involved James Hansen, arguably the world’s most famous climate scientist. Sometimes called the “father” of global warming, Hansen works for NASA. In early 2006, the scientist charged there had been a clampdown on his freedom of speech after he had given a public lecture discussing the dangers of global warming.

In one case a young NASA aide named George Deutsch helped to divert an interview request for Hansen that came from a National Public Radio show. Deutsch later resigned when it was revealed that contrary to his résumeé, he had not yet graduated from Texas A&M University.

James Hansen’s case is made all the more outrageous because of the urgent message he was struggling to convey to the rest of us. Hansen has become convinced that we have an ever-narrowing window in which to address global warming before we suffer its severest consequences—namely, the destabilization of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. This, in turn, could lead to massive sea-level rise on the order of tens of feet, and thus the submersion of many heavily inhabited continental coastal areas and islands in coming centuries.

But Hansen wasn’t the only example of a government climate scientist who experienced constraints upon his ability to discuss global warming with the broader public. Take Thomas Knutson, a constituent of Rush Holt (D-New Jersey). Knutson, a soft-spoken scientist, runs massively complex climate models on massively expensive supercomputers at a government lab in Princeton. The classic technocrat also happens to be an expert on the relationship between global warming and hurricanes. So after the devastating 2005 Atlantic hurricane season—which featured four Category 5 storms, including Katrina—Knutson was prevented by government PR flacks from giving two national television interviews.

In August 2007, Bush announced plans for an international “climate change summit.” Greenpeace responded: “It’s a step forward that Bush no longer denies man-made global warming, but there has to be a concern that this is yet another attempt to derail the U.N. climate change negotiations set for December… Bush speaks about…voluntary targets… [This summit] must not allow Bush to distract the U.N. from December’s meeting, where the goal must be the kind of deep binding emissions cuts that Bush still strongly opposes.”

You might argue, of course, that these are just anecdotes—a few outrageous stories, but scientists don’t draw general conclusions without real statistics, and neither should we.

It turns out that we do actually have statistics about how bad the situation has gotten with respect to science in the Bush Administration. A group called the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which tracks the issue, has collaborated with a number of other organizations to survey governmentemployed scientists about political interference. A number of surveys have been conducted by various branches of the government that employ lots of researchers—the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the FDA, etc.—and the results are eye-opening. For example, in a survey of government climate researchers, the UCS found that 46% of respondents felt pressure to remove the words global warming or climate change from various documents, while 43% reported that edits had altered the meaning of their scientific results.

In other words, the spreading of bullshit has become systemic within the federal government. When the interests of religious zealots, oilmen and the rest of Bush’s backers are involved, ideology always trumps science in this corrupt administration. Finally, it’s important to note that the scientific distortions aren’t merely occurring below the radar in the editing of scientific reports, the quashing of scientists or the stacking of advisory panels. The President himself has uttered them.

As recently as 2006, Bush could be found falsely claiming that a “fundamental debate” still existed over whether human greenhouse gas emissions are causing global temperatures to rise. And on an issue where there’s even more scientific certainty, evolution, the President voiced his support for teaching the pseudoscientific “intelligent design” concept in high school science classes nationwide.

Still, it’s a fair question as to why this so-called “war on science”—which involves distortions, misrepresentations and suppression across the government— has emerged under Bush rather than under previous Presidents. While there’s no single answer, it’s quite clear that many of the attacks on science are intended to reward and appease the special interests that helped put Bush in office in the first place. That’s especially true of corporate America, which has a vested interest in downplaying global warming, and the Christian Right, which obsesses about sex and abortion as well as Darwin. In short, the whole thing looks a lot like a good old-fashioned spoils system.

Reality isn’t up for a vote, though, and our government is supposed to remain competent and intact throughout multiple Presidential administrations. That’s where the true damage from the GOP jihad on science makes itself felt: A huge alphabet soup of government agencies—staffed by scientists and technocrats whose salaries are paid by the public—has now had its credibility thoroughly undermined. Why would a talented young scientist want to go work in one of these agencies, given the alarming stories about science politicization and the low morale among scientists already working there? And why would we, the public, continue to trust these agencies?

On November 7, 2006, Democrats took control of Congress and have already started investigating some of the most egregious cases in which the Bush Administration attacked science. James Hansen, Tom Knutson, Philip Cooney and George Deutsch were called to testify before Congressional committees. We’ll see whether this new, high-level pressure makes the Bush Administration more honest or not. But so far, it has only helped to prompt one of the most incredible bullshit admissions yet.

Earlier this year, the White House had the gall to put out a statement claiming that President Bush has “consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem.” It was a bold-faced lie, but a somewhat hopeful one. At least this time around, the Bush Administration’s denial of reality involves denying its previous denial of reality.

JOHN NICHOLS, the Washington correspondent ofThe Nation, is also a contributor to The Progressive and In These Times and a bestselling author. His latest book,The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism (TheNewPress.com), reveals startling parallels between previous presidencies and the Bush regime’s abuses of power. In a compelling interview, Nichols roasts corporate media and boldly lays out a bill of particulars for impeaching Bush and Cheney.

HUSTLER: The Genius of Impeachment discusses Congressman Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to censure and/or impeach President James Polk following the unprovoked imperialistic invasion of Mexico in 1848.

JOHN NICHOLS: The founders established the impeachment power in the Constitution with the purpose of constraining the executive. That was their intent from the beginning. They were terrified a President would become a king for four years, that upon election a President would cease respecting the Constitution and would simply do as he chose.That protection was placed there for a specific reason. Madison and Jefferson and others were very specific. They wanted to chain the dogs of war, to ensure Presidents could not do what kings had always done: lead the country into wars of whim or political desire.

In the 1840s, President Polk—a slaveholder—realized slavery was on the way out. Mexico, Britain and other countries were banning it; he was terrified. Polk said the old order was passing, and he looked at the map and basically said, “How do we get more slave states? … Why don’t we invade a relatively weak, poor country to our south, seize lots of territory there, and then we can make all that territory into a bunch of states.” The 1840s/1850s compromises stated that if you were below the Mason-Dixon Line, you could be a slave state.The more states permitting slavery, he reasoned, the more powerful the slave interest would be.

But a young Congressman came out of the Midwest to challenge this war more aggressively than any members of Congress are currently challenging the Iraq War—except perhaps Representatives Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters.

Was the Mexican-American War launched under false pretexts?

There were lies that Mexicans had attacked Americans. So this young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, went to the House floor every day with a “Spot Resolution” and essentially said: “President Polk, show me the spot where a single drop of American blood was shed. And if you cannot show it to me, then tell me why we should not act against you as a sovereign who has lied to the American people and their Congress for the purpose of launching an illegal war.”

When Lincoln challenged Polk, [Lincoln's] law partner back in Illinois sent him a letter saying—and I’m paraphrasing here—”You can’t attack the President in a time of war. He’s the commander in chief. The troops are in the field.” Lincoln wrote back, “If I don’t criticize the President in a time of war, then we return the Presidency to the status of a king, and do exactly what we fought against. We make our sovereign an individual who can by whim and lie lead us into a war that will kill our children, empty our treasury and warp the very intents of the country.” Ultimately, Polk didn’t seek a second term.

The biggest tragedy today is that we don’t have enough Abe Lincolns in Congress, because it’s the same struggle: fact after fact, detail after detail, a President doing it without the permission of Congress—these elements come into play.We’ve fought these battles before [and] always come to the same conclusion: A President who does this must be sanctioned. If he is not, we establish in the Presidency a royalty that our founders said would destroy the country.

Do you think Bush will rein himself in?

Fear of losing your power and place in history, being a President sanctioned by censure or impeachment, causes even the most bombastic or irresponsible of Presidents to become self-protective. The push for impeachment is a vehicle by which we might well see George Bush step back from the brink. And if he doesn’t, that clash between the executive and the legislative, which the founders intended and wanted, [happens]. That clash becomes a popular discussion, not a Congressional or legal discussion. The people watch it, decide and tell their members of Congress, “Yes, go after this guy.” Or as happened with Clinton, [the people] say, “Back off; this is ridiculous.” However it plays out, it’s a very democratic process because the President, in the midst of his term—not just merely at an election—is forced to respond to the popular will and to the House of Representatives. When it doesn’t happen for too long, Presidents take more power unto themselves.

Are there grounds for impeaching George W. Bush?

You don’t publish a large enough magazine to detail them all. Smart people have written books on this, [including] Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon era. Let’s be very blunt about the specifics: Bush deceived Congress, intentionally and specifically, for the purpose of launching a war of whim rather than necessity—not a defensive war but a war of desire. We see a violation of the separation of powers, the Constitutional determination that we have a system of checks and balances. Bush swore an oath to a Constitution that says only Congress can declare war. So we have an impeachable offense. There’s simply no question.

Spying on the American people. More revelations in this regard, not merely via the USA PATRIOT Act, but also all the warrantless wiretapping. A viola-tion, not just of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but also of the Fourth Amendment—[prohibiting] spying on people in their homes without permission of the courts and Congress. Signing statements, an absolutely regal act, that of a king; again, in direct violation of the Constitution’s clear definition of how Congress passes a law: The President signs or vetoes that law.

The punishment of political critics and foes. The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case. Again, this goes directly to past impeachments. The third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved the use of his office to punish or to go after political critics.

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, Bush’s sanction of torture and extraordinary rendition. People say, “That violates the Geneva Conventions.” The Constitution requires us to obey our treaties as we obey the law of the land. So if Bush violates the Geneva Conventions, he violates the law. But it’s also a violation of the Bill of Rights, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.

Just in that bare minimum list, we have grounds for an impeachment process any founder would have respected and encouraged. If Jefferson and Madison were here, they’d say: “What are you waiting for? We gave you the outline.We were very specific about when you should do it in a time of war.”

Jefferson said, “We have created a near-perfect republic, but will they keep it?”When he asked that, he wasn’t saying, “Will Congress keep it? Will the press keep it?” He was talking about the people.

Let’s discuss Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy, which you cowrote with Robert McChesney and others. How has the press let us down regarding impeachment?

We have a corporate press in America. Our mainstream media operates in much the same way as an official media does in a royal state, or even in some dictatorships. You may say, “Well, that’s a pretty extreme statement.” Not at all. The press is most useful to power when it maintains the image of being independent and skeptical, but never really is.

Look at the run-up to the war in Iraq. Two days before the war began—on America’s preeminent talk show, Meet the Press—the Vice President is asked, “What’s this war going to be like?” Cheney’s supposed to be the smart one, the guy who knows what’s going on, an ex-secretary of defense. He says, “We’ll be greeted as liberators.” Many Americans believed him, not just because Cheney said it, but because [host] Tim Russert nodded and said, “Very good,” then went on to the next question.

Both the Washington Post and New York Times eventually printed apologies for supporting the administration’s pre-invasion justifications.

So did 60 Minutes for its Ahmed Chalabi story, which was irresponsible and wrong.We have lots of apologies in the aftermath, but the press isn’t supposed to apologize afterward. It’s supposed to try and get it right at the time.

It’s the wonderful opportunity of our craft to be able to speak truth to power. In the Iraq War’s runup, much of the press practiced stenography rather than journalism. The founders figured Presidents and Vice Presidents would lie. They created an incredibly broad freedom of the press so someone would raise their hand and say, “No, this is wrong; this is a lie.”

What accounts for the press’s failure?

It’s too consolidated, too big. One theory is when you get big, you become powerful and can boldly do whatever you want. The opposite is true: Gulliver’s Travels is right. When you become a giant, you’re more easily constrained. It’s not just that they’re corporate, rejecting civic and democratic values of the individual owner, the smalltown guy with his paper, his little radio station. The corporate media wants to make lots of money and appeal to the broadest number of people with the least amount of responsibility.

As a result, you get a press that gives you lots of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears, but very little about our trade deficit or real details of our military engagements around the world or a nuclear plant melting down, etc., because they know Anna Nicole and Britney will keep you entertained. Thus you create the fantasy of a news operation without its responsibility.

That responsibility requires two things big media doesn’t like. First, expenditure. It costs money to go around the world, find out what’s going on. Number two, when you offend power—particularly when you’re in the broadcast media—power says, “Well, we’re not going to talk to you anymore.” In broadcast, when you lose the image of the individual sitting down and talking to you, you lose a lot. So it’s much easier to simply say, “We’re not going to pick on you too much.”

What Jefferson and Madison intended with freepress protection was a wild, cacophonous, at times irresponsible media. They figured you give them all these voices, and people sort it out—they trusted the people. Today, media’s biggest problem is it doesn’t trust the people. It feels you can’t speak truths about difficult things because it will upset the masses. So after 9/11, instead of a discussion about why this occurred, we had a “Why do they hate us?” discussion.

I’ll accept there are probably some people who hate us for our “freedoms.” Some fundamentalists really do want a pretty constrained and unpleasant world. But there’s a broad, deep discussion to be had. After 9/11, Americans were ready for it. I met many people who had so many questions, were really struggling to find out a lot. After 9/11, what media had the biggest, long-term increase in audiences? London’s The Guardian, Independent and BBC. Americans desperate for information looked to their own media and said, “I’m not getting it here.”

The people’s desire for honest information is far greater than most folks in media accept. It troubles me deeply that it took until this last year for one guy in [TV] to start really speaking truth to power— Keith Olbermann. We’re five years into this post- 9/11 period before somebody actually steps up and says, “I’m going to start talking about this in blunt ways.” What happened? It’s supposed to be the kiss of death, right? People came racing to Olbermann, and the effect has been profound.

Do you also think the news media relinquished its role vis-à-vis Iraq because opposing the powers-that-be might lead to punishment?

Bill Maher said some blunt things and was shot down by the White House Press Secretary. Was he dragged off in chains like editors were in the days of John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts? No, we’re more sophisticated now. The White House itself just says, “This guy’s not patriotic. He’s a bad guy.”

Look at Helen Thomas, dean of the White House press corps; she was always called on first. Quite a remarkable woman who’s known every President back to Eisenhower. Yet she was treated with maximum disrespect by the Bush Administration, moved to the back corner of the White House press room, because she’s asking skeptical questions. They didn’t call on her anymore. You can get mad at the Bush White House for that. But you should also get mad at the press corps. Why didn’t they say, “This is the senior member of our craft here, and you’re treating her with maximum disrespect; we don’t accept that”?

Tell us about Vice President Cheney, the subject of your hard-hitting 2004 biography Dick, the Man Who Is President.

Cheney avoided serving in the military as a young man, taking five deferments to avoid Vietnam. When he was secretary of defense, despite his lack of experience in military affairs and defense issues, he and his office came up with a plan for invading Iraq during the first Gulf War. [General] Norman Schwarzkopf said, “It’s very interesting, except the way you’re invading, you’d strand our troops in the middle of the desert without water.” Cheney’s incompetence at every turn is just startling.

As Halliburton’s CEO, he organized a merger with another company, failing to do due diligence. It turns out they have billions of dollars in asbestos claims; it almost put Halliburton into complete crisis. They hustled him out quickly to become Vice President just in time to oversee privatization of the military.

One of the biggest problems we have in the Iraq War right now is a largely privatized support system for our military. Ask yourselves, “How are we spending so much money?” Two billion dollars every ten days spent on this war. Yet we can’t get body armor, don’t have vehicles strong enough to withstand mortar attacks. There’s so many brave young Americans being terribly injured or killed. A lot is [because] we’ve created a dysfunctional relationship between the military and its suppliers—these private firms are dominant.They get the big money. If you’re in Iraq, you’ll find somebody getting poverty pay—that’s a soldier. Somebody getting $80,000, $100,000, for doing the same thing a soldier might do, that’s a private contractor. We’ve thrown the entire thing out of whack.

Cheney has always gotten it wrong, and it’s amazing how much of the press corps says, “He’s the administration’s smart, capable guy.”

Are Bush, Cheney and their clique merely elitists who simply think the rules were drawn up for controlling the masses, but don’t apply to them?

You hit it right on the head. This is an issue I come back to all the time: royalism. The American experiment was all about rejecting royalism, the divine right of kings, the notion that God chose our rulers. So [the Founding Fathers] revolted against it. They happened to be people of the Enlightenment who created a relatively liberal state with lots of openness and freedom. But their core instinct was that a ruler shouldn’t have different rules than the people.

Cheney and Bush, their circle and many people in Washington hearken back to that old royalism. They think they have a separate set of rules, that the people are stupid and ought to be constrained morally, economically, etc. I think the opposite: Our leaders ought to be restricted, and the people ought to be free. Jefferson said, “The people should not fear their government. The government should fear the people.”

What can citizens do to advance impeachment?

First, understand it’s not a radical act. Impeachment is a live instrument, something the founders mention six times in the Constitution. They wanted you to know this is yours; you can use it. Get over your fears. The truth is, impeachment is the cure for Constitutional crisis.

The folks of the After Downing Street Coalition have impeachment information online. Get active locally. Communities across this country have passed impeachment resolutions telling Congress, “We want you to raise this issue and get active on this.” That’s a really valuable tool. Let your imagination be free; believe it’s possible. Then act. Go to a town meeting, write a letter, encourage your city council, your town board, to do something on this. It all matters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On April 24, 2007, Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich filed articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney in the House of Representatives. On July 22, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold announced that he would introduce two censure resolutions condemning the President, Vice President and other administration officials for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq and for their repeated assaults on the rule of law.