Op Ed: IMPEACHMENT: Now or Never

To re-shape Democracy, our “World-Leader Nation” now must prove Democratic strength.

Courtesy: cc.nih.gov

(BEND, Ore.) - Great democratic traditions for the entire world now hang in limbo while we Americans tolerate by far the most serious challenge in our history to what we really stand for; and believe demanded for the entire world to prosper further.

A royalist-minded President has procured for himself and his cohorts tremendous powers over the average citizen never contemplated in the Constitution; and, indeed, abrogated, firmly and fully denied by our Founders on their own full study of world-famed philosophers and history.

Fortunately those well-informed and extremely prescient Founders also built in for our full consideration precisely the mechanism demanded to provide essential safe-remediation: The process of Congressional impeachment of the Executive.

Their obvious intention was to preserve and strengthen the unique features of our Revolutionary new democracy: Its reliance on continuing surveillance and cooperative control to prevent precisely this now-obvious attack by those seduced by their own success in overwhelming and undermining our basic tri-form of governance: Congressional legislation; Executive operation; and Supreme Court supervision.

Will we now have the strength and determination to continue and preserve the long-proven place for Congressional control cooperatively exercised with the Executive and the Court? You can be sure “the world is watching” NOW to see how, with our long-vaunted “free press” and deep democratic traditions, we will act --OR fail to act? - on this most-direct Executive-challenge ever recorded.

What we DO --not simply say we might do-- means more, to both our own national form of governance and to the world awaiting our response, than ever before since 1776.

Democracy is denuded of its depth and deep appeal when thus subjected to the major damages clearly apparent in our recent history; ever since the neo-con attack on our basic principles was allowed to begin thirty years ago in the Reagan era; led then-as-now by some of the same neo-conservatives, seeking as-always imperious political and personal power while pretending a full complement of “democratic values”.

Distortion and perversion of what the world has come to believe can be the saving-grace for all democracy, as demonstrated here since 1776, began its precipitous descent into seductively royalist-principled Presidential powers then.

Secret war operations and highly questionable U.S. actions worldwide thus began reversal of the real role played in many lives by government guidance and assistance, for those whose life-structures demanded what democracy alone can supply.

“Less Is More” where government goes and grows became the misleading montage of meanings-applied to any and all ways to cut, slash, control and discontinue whatever and wherever federal support for essential services and supply could be accomplished.

“Liberal” became “a conveniently-distorted adjectival attack”, in turn denuded of its real resonance from the full pages of our history.

Don’t ever discount the indisputable long-range impacts on every level of democratic governance, from city hall through state capitals across the nation and, in most damaging fashion, vs every possible Congressional action to move forward on badly-needed and essential progressive actions; over that whole thirty years of neo-con deception and damage leading on to the Bush-based debacle and deplorable War III atomic danger now desperately flourished.

Let us hope that red button does NOT get punched, by whatever motivation or mechanism, during the rest of this deplorable and now-despairing administration of incompetents for their own totally incomprehensible neo-con ‘principles’.

The second Bush administration has now very obviously repeated and even consummated some of the most serious Presidential demolitions of our democracy ever so far allowed to take place in this nation.

Meanwhile many and multiple mechanisms for making from crony capitalism “a canny new-way-to-wealth” have become a carefully built-in operating method broadly at work for the rich-and-powerful; while the nation and its very large majority of citizens is allowed only the bare minimum of guidance, assistance and support.

The recent Bush-veto of SCHIP-renewal, allowing essential and extremely needed healthcare for millions of children now forced to do-without, is a prime recent example; followed by billions-more of U.S. dollars donated to Mexico for its internal drug-control; with that funding was carefully slipped into multiple-more-billions for the controlling debacle of the Iraq war, now approaching a very hot-total of over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.

Of course, there is no way of actually counting and costing-out the desperate damage of deaths involving our own best-young as well as those of the nation we “attacked for neo-con reasons”.

Nor can we count up for the record what can and should have been, accomplished by that same excruciating expenditure at home.

Let it be noted that “the Iraq hole-in-American life” was clearly, if not cleanly, “sold to our citizens by demonstrated fraud and deception”; perpetrated precisely by those corporate controls on media channels already illuminated; and further fashioned to follow up and fly-again right into the face of good faith democratic “conversation” on these issues by both citizens and our elected representatives at every level from city hall through state capital to the Congress itself.

Continuous controlled-attack on workers unions and every other possible cooperative working-world protection was first and foremost among the many tools turned against citizens all of these thirty years; while corporations shaped and set up extremely serious and surely controlling domination of every mass media managing communications to supply the citizenry with the essential information demanded first for understanding issues-at-stake; and then rallying robust citizen-inputs for elected-representative consideration and decision.

Widespread corporatist control of communications and continuing “conservative philosophy” constituting direct, strong, continuous attack on each and every government function began then, and has continued under full GOP sanction ever since whenever in place to act.

The entire history of the Federal Communications Commission reflects precisely this particular level and form of open attack on democratic principles of free and responsible press and media.

In this age of corporatist control of the state, what we allow to happen here can and will surely shape and perhaps even come to control our whole world.

If in no other way, the highly unfortunate precedent we set when we fail in our defense-of-democracy thus threatens the very clear concept developed from the days of the Founders.

What we MUST DO, while the world watches, is to deny and defy any and all such Presidential pretences motivating a crass and extremely unconscionable coup, closely coupled with dangerous corporatist controls on citizen-serving communications.

That action --sturdy, determined, rational and responsible defense - OR the lack-thereof - represents a definitive action on our part RIGHT NOW at the beginnings of our 21st Century in this world.

We cannot possibly await the outcome of “laissez faire management” so clearly threatening all-that-has-gone before in this nation, still the best ultimate hope of the rest of the world, without setting extremely damaging precedent for any future Presidency.

Will that failure-in-defense become our historic “example of how democracy can die-from-the-root” --as well as be decimated by all those other causes firmly found over the centuries for all of our predecessors proclaiming democracy in less determined formats?

OR will we stand-up to be counted as solid continuing defenders of the faith and full concepts we inherited from our Founding Fathers?