The non-impeachment of George Bush

This one is another from Keith Olberman, who seems to posses an extraordinary combination of naiveté and backbone – that is to say he’s naive enough to believe the system of government we have in America *should* work (and presumably would work if only “the right people” were running it), but he’s got enough of a spine that instead of just getting sad and disillusioned when things obviously aren’t working, he’s willing to stick his neck out and make a fuss.

As for me? Of course Bush is a criminal. Duh. We knew that from the moment he seized power with a rigged election back in 2000. But I can’t claim to be at all surprised by the Democrats complete failure to impeach the bastard and lock his mass-murdering ass up. We have a 1-party system in America with 2 faces, and the fact is that both our major political parties are solidly in favor of continuing American military domination of the planet for as long as possible (basically until it bankrupts us all). It was Kennedy who sent troops into Vietnam, after all; and even the liberal left’s darling Obama has been pretty overt about wanting to send US troops into Pakistan and has echoed Bush’s saber-rattling against Iran.

What’s more, if the Dem’s were to impeach Bush for war crimes it’d open the door to one of theirs being impeached next time. And there will be a next time, you can count on it. America has had a war every 10 years since the revolution (on average) and almost all of them have been wars of aggression.

At root though I think it’s mostly just politics. They know he’s going to be out of office soon and that as a whole most Americans – who will apparently always choose convenience over justice – are less interested in seeing Bush locked up then they are in just getting someone else in. So they’ll go ahead and let Kucinich read his articles of impeachment into the record and then completely fail to do anything at all about them.

As for what this tells us about the state of constitutional government in America in 2008, Olberman and the professor he brings on are half right. Yes, the spinelessness of the Democrats goes beyond the normal limits that America’s founders probably envisioned. But more then that, this whole mess reveals the big flaw in the whole idea of ‘checks and balances’ that the constitution itself is based on. The fact is, that the people who populate the various branches of the State are not interested in fulfilling their role in some archaic power sharing scheme. The whole concept of limited government, the ideal on which the American constitution was based, is clearly a failure. Government cannot and will not limit itself. It is a vortex that always seeks to enlarge itself, regardless of the rhetoric of the people running it. Power attracts power, and wherever and whenever power is concentrated into the hands of a minority that minority will attempt to use the power they have to gain even more. The history of the nation state over the last 300 years shows this clearly. Republican democracy is a contradiction in terms.

The alternative to the absolutist State that the American colonists had a revolution against is not the “limited” State described in the US Constitution. That government, which was only able to be put into place because at the time only wealthy white male landowners could vote, is and has always been designed to centralize power and authority into the hands of the federal government at the expense of individuals and local communities. That’s why even at the time of the constitutions passage the vast majority of Americans (most of whom were not allowed to vote) opposed it. Their voices were silenced by the electoral process then and our voices have been silenced by that same system of government ever since. The antidote to a bloated corrupt overly-centralized bureaucracy is not ‘checks and balances’ or the election of yet another generation of politicians who promise reform (just like all the people they’d be replacing promised reform), the antidote is Anarchy. And the democrats – by their refusal to do the job which the Constitution assigned them to do and put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of their Party – have made the case for Anarchism far more strongly then I could.

Posted: June 10th, 2008 under news.
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