Towards Impeachment

U.S. Representative John Conyers has introduced a bill to censure Bush and Cheney, with the prospect of eventual impeachment. Conyers argues that because the Bush administration has failed to provide information on their manifold exploits, it is currently not possible to impeach. So he aims to censure them, demand answers and THEN impeach.

Shakespeare's Sister has more here.

John Nichols at The Nation has a good article: Raising the Issue of Impeachment.

Elsewhere, Jack D. Douglas has a good rant at the perils of creeping Fascism:

Bush II has proudly and defiantly thrown the gauntlet of Despotic Tyranny into our faces in this vast Media Propaganda Campaign this week. He is utterly convinced that the American people will stare into that face of Tyranny and applaud its dictates and spying and mass murders and tortures.

I fear he is right and I am certain this is a great turning point for us Americans, a moment of fateful and fearful commitment.

And Sydney H. Schanberg looks at the US war propaganda machine in action:

The Rendon Group and the Lincoln Group are two of the companies working for the Pentagon. Both say they are forbidden by their contracts to talk about the details of their work. The Pentagon insists that all the stories they produce contain accurate information. No one can be surprised about propaganda efforts, since they've always been used in wars and occupations to counter adversarial or false information in the local press. But if the stories are factual, as the Pentagon says, why the secrecy?

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld regularly accuse the press of failing to give a complete picture of what's taking place in Iraq. That's laughable - the laughter of the theater of the absurd. If they want us to enlarge the portrait of Iraq, then please open some doors and let us see the whole picture. And not just in Iraq, but on domestic policy as well.

I like Schanberg's description of the Bush team's spin focus:

The Bush circus train now is easy to describe?its crew members are still running an election campaign, with all the bells and whistles: the carefully selected audiences, the president's incessant stump speeches, the stage props, and the billboard-like slogans. This is more like a sales campaign for a new line of gas-guzzling SUVs than a competent government leadership team wrestling with matters of war and peace and the travails of ordinary people.

To this White House, apparently, everything is merely an issue of image, of getting a soothing message up on some giant screen.

That giant screen is called television.