Am I hallucinating?

At the top here, for your consideration, is a comparison of two photos of our esteemed President. The left is a photo from last Wednesday, December the 14th. The right is a photo from Saturday, December the 18th. Is it just me, or is he perhaps losing all the color in his hair?

This has (again) been a bad few days for George Walker Bush (so bad that I doubt anyone could fault him for his hair going white in the midst of it), and I revel in his suffering. I revel in his suffering so much so that when I flipped on CNN this afternoon and saw Wolf Blitzer with a big white-lettered panel at the bottom of the screen reading "IMPEACHMENT?" I genuinely wondered if I was hallucinating. Impeachment has been in the back of my mind for a long while. Bush has certainly committed a plethora of impeachable offenses during his reign, but the likelihood that enough members of Congress would actually have the testicular fortitude to call him on it seemed slim. Until today, I guessed that the odds that he would find himself impeached stood at between 10 and 15 percent. Despite Wolf Blitzer and his speculations, I still say it's unlikely-but the numbers are rising. I call it at 20% today. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to hit the jackpot.

If you're reading this blog, the odds are, you already know why Bush should be impeached. The odds are that you agree with me and that this is familiar territory to you. Nonetheless, the rage boils within me, and just as it did after Katrina, it must be heard.

Bush did do some good things in recent days. He finally said that he was responsible for the intelligence failures. He asked for the nation's patience on Sunday, admitting that the work in Iraq that still lies ahead will be difficult, but must be done. Both were something that he should have done long ago, but even late, they were good things to say. For a moment on Sunday, watching his speech, I mused upon the possibility of some genuine reflection creeping its way into his brain. A remembrance of the things he said and did over the days before immediately made me suspicious of such a possibility. The things that have come to light since then crushed it entirely.

Our President has said that we do not torture.

Alberto Gonzales has argued that the Geneva Convention does not apply to "enemy combatants." Thus, if the Geneva Convention restrictions do not apply, if we don't call it torture, it isn't legally torture. What do we call torture? Pain that causes organ failure or death. Nothing short of that is torture. This is bullshit, of course. Attaching jump leads to someone's balls? That's torture. Waterboarding someone-a practice so terrifying that the toughest person it's ever been applied to in our current war on terror was begging to confess in two and a half minutes-is torture. Torture degrades its victims, degrades its practitioners, and degrades the people it is said to be done in the name of. It also generates unreliable information, leaving it a practice that only the viciously thoughtless will employ in all but the most unthinkable of circumstances.

The President's lawyers have argued that his constitutional power to make war is "plenary"-that is, perfect, complete, and absolute. The President himself has said, in an interview with Bob Woodward, that "the most interesting thing about being the president" is that "I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

I will Article I, Section 8 your ass, Mr. President. "The Congress shall have Power...To declare War...and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." The Presidency is not an office invested with the powers of an Emperor. The President does, in fact, have to give explanations-every four years at election time, and every single day to the Congress and Courts of the United States of America.

The President has said that in this new age of terrorism, the Executive requires the power to act speedily, tracing the communication of people changing cell numbers, acting over the internet, and all the other difficult-to-trace methods of modern technological communication. He has also given us assurances that such broad authority will only be used to target those affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 created a secret court to provide intelligence wiretap warrants. It also allowed for the Executive to wiretap without a warrant for 72 hours in emergency cases, requiring them to notify the FISA court at some point within that 72-hour window, which would then either grant or deny the right to continue the interception. The President already had the power he is now claiming-the only difference is that he wants the Judicial Branch entirely out of the equation. Additionally, the actions of the Bush Administration have demonstrated precisely why no President should ever be allowed such unfettered power:
-Within the Pentagon, a classified group called the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) was formed in 2002. Without warrants, they have gathered a database (called the "Talon" database, of all things) that includes "threat reports" regarding antiwar protest organizers. A spokesman for the Pentagon has said that all information gathered is gathered legally and regards “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” One threat report is on a Quaker meeting that CIFA infiltrated.
-The Patriot Act gave the FBI the power to demand information with the use of warrant-free "national security letters." Previously, they were for terrorism suspects alone, but the wisely-crafted Patriot Act let the FBI issue them to citizens suspected of nothing. If one was investigated using these letters and found to be innocent of any crime, policy used to be to destroy all the information gathered. In 2003, President Bush decided that all data gathered should be put into permanent databases and shared throughout the federal government and, in some cases, with private industry.
-FBI counterterrorism teams have spent a great deal of time since 2001 investigating and infiltrating violent Al Qaeda sympathizer groups such as Greenpeace and PETA.

To all of this, there is but one answer: the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the palce to be search, and the persons or things to be seized.

Or, as I prefer it, "Fuck you, Mr. President."

After a previous blog entry, I was spoken to by someone that I previously thought had a rather admirable sense of balance in political thinking. He informed me, with the implication of a threat, that my statement of enjoying the President's political difficulties upon the milestone death of the 2,000th soldier in Iraq might be misinterpreted as celebrating the death of people sworn to protect my freedom and safety and thus might make me "the enemy." Thus, I will make this as explicit and unambiguous as I can.

The First Amendment gives me the right to say anything I please. I can, if I so choose, say celebratory things upon the death of people sworn to protect my freedom and safety. Such statements would not make me an enemy of America. Only upon taking action to threaten the safety or freedom of my fellow citizens would it become legal or right for there to be any action taken against me. Even then I would be entitled, as any human being within the borders of the United States or any territory it occupies is, to my Constitutional and human rights.

I do not so choose. I respect the men and women who have chosen to take up arms in defense of an ideal. They put their lives on the line for a cause which has faltered and, in some sense, forsaken them, and yet they are still there, ready and willing to suffer and die to defend America. The failures of the current era are not, for the most part, theirs. They are the President's, and ours. We as citizens have not done our duty to maintain our own system of government, and so the military has been abused by an Executive run amok and a Congress and Judiciary too weak to claim their own Constitutional powers.

I do choose to celebrate the pain of a man I consider an utter criminal, the President of the United States, George Walker Bush. At the beginning, I thought him merely an arrogant jackass, a man so impressed with his own luck and wit because he was oblivious to the circle of family and friends who had carried him through his life, weakening him while he thought he was growing stronger and wiser. An arrogant jackass made President of the United States, however, quickly becomes a criminal, and so he has. He has lied to the American people to convince them to follow him to war. He has sent American soldiers to their deaths while aping their service on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. He has illegally spied upon the American people, egregiously violating the very freedoms he claims to be protecting. He has endorsed the kidnapping and torture of innocent people abroad. He has endorsed the creation of a system of secret prisons around the world. He has claimed the right to classify American citizens "enemy combatants" and strip them of their freedom and their rights on his own authority, with no judicial recourse or Congressional oversight. He has appointed unqualified fools to positions where expertise is the difference between life and death for thousands. And still he has the audicity to claim, as he did Sunday night, to be "serving in freedom's cause."

Am I an enemy to this kind of a President? I most certainly am. I proudly am. He is a shortsighted, vicious, arrogant, petty, ignorant, hypocritical fool. I see his face these days, and I see fear. I see a realization that perhaps, just perhaps, this is a series of blunders that no family or friends can protect him from. I see a tinge of panic, of worry, and to this, I say, it is good. The guilty should panic. They should worry. And they should suffer.

If there does come a day in which George Walker Bush is removed from office, or resigns in disgrace, he will on that day suffer greatly. Our country will finally stop its suffering, and it will begin the slow process of recovery from the damage he has done, repairing our own ills and reviving the friendships aroud the world that he has hurt, reassuring them that we are not all like that moronic Texan. And I will raise a glass, toasting the future of a country I see as the world's brightest hope, and celebrating the pain and anguish of a man who deserves everything he gets, and far, far worse.