THE IMPEACHMENT FILES: Isn't It Too Late?

Originally published on OpEdNews on September 4, 2008.

On July 28th, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked on ABC’s The View why she insists on “not impeaching” Bush and Cheney. She responded: “If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a different story.” She finished her rationalization by implying that no-one yet had “the goods”, as she put it, on the President. However, Pelosi has yet to address the substance of – and perhaps even to read, if her off-hand comment is to be believed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUlhmOQEI_M), the 35 Articles of Impeachment against Bush which Rep. Dennis Kucinich proposed to the House on June 9th. Yet Kucinich isn’t giving up. His speech at the DNC was so rousing, the amazed crowd cheered incessantly through most of it and continued for some time after:http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dennis-Kucinich-s-Rousing-by-Meryl-Ann-Butler-080826-755.html. And he wants 1 million signatures for impeachment by Sept. 10th. Sign his petition to Congress at: http://kucinich.us/

Since “the goods” on Bush are already there, in the documentation Kucinich gave Congress (as well as many other places), much more attention should be paid to these 35 Articles. 

"But isn’t it too late? The 110th Congress is almost over..."

Congress reconvenes Sept. 8 for a mere 3 weeks with a “target adjournment” date of Sept. 26. Then they will likely focus on campaigning; 1/3rd of the Senate and the entire House are up for re-election. However, even if they do adjourn on schedule, that break may not have to be the final story. Some members did return to Capitol Hill over the summer – Republicans with their sudden election-year concern for gas prices, and, more importantly, the House Judiciary Committee, which Chairman John Conyers, Jr. called back to investigate the allegations by reporter Ron Suskind that Cheney’s office, with the CIA, forged a pre-invasion letter implying a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. I think this shows the Judiciary Committee could begin impeachment even if Congress is not in full session. And in that case Pelosi’s canard, that impeachment is too distracting from the work of law-making, would be completely inapplicable.

Moreover, the investigations have already happened. We’ve been at it for years. Bush’s crimes are public record. You don’t need FBI agents snooping around for months; you just need the word ‘impeachment’ and the website ‘Amazon’ and the whole case could be made. Impeachment movement leaders keep trying to tell people: it could take only a few days.

Recent House Judiciary Committee events have energized the impeachment movement: the testimony of Scott McClellan, the HJC vote to hold no-show Karl Rove in contempt of Congress, the July 25th hearing on the limits of executive power at which the word “impeachment” came up countless times, (watch over a dozen of the speakers at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/35061  and also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8chOuPZaIkQ   and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJW5WTs3yT4), the July 31st ruling by District Court Judge John Bates that the White House cannot ignore congressional subpoenas, and the subsequent Aug. 26th refusal of Bates to grant the White House a stay on that decision http://judiciary.house.gov/news/080826.html. Re-invigorated, Veterans for Peace, Democrats.com, and National Impeachment Network activists will lobby in D.C. for 2-3 weeks this month. Kucinich’s champion Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL, 19th) and other pro-impeachment HJC members, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA, 35th) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN, 5th), have told activists not to quit. Also, at the July 25th proceeding, HJC member Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI, 2nd) gave a clarion call for impeachment hearings as the next step.

There is another point. As Jon Ponder remarks in The Pensito Review, Pelosi took impeachment “off the table” for the 110th Congress, not the 111th.

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/01/15/bush-legacy-post-term-impeachment/

“But there isn’t enough time to impeach Bush before he leaves office…”

Tobi Dragert of the L.A. Area Impeachment Center told me that impeachment historian John Nichols (also Washington Correspondent for The Nation) informed the Progressive Democrats of America forum in Denver last week that post-term impeachment is possible, and that it would follow the same path as the regular kind: from the House Judiciary Committee to the Senate. This surprised me, so I did some research.

Ironically, it’s the Republicans who argued for post-term impeachment last. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), who voted ‘not proven’ during Clinton’s impeachment trial, told FOX in early 2001 that Clinton could still be impeached even though he had left office--this time for allegedly taking bribes to grant pardons. "President Clinton avoided a conviction on impeachment the last time around because he had not lost the confidence of the American people, and we didn't want to shake up the government,” Specter said. He added, “but he's not in office anymore"; as if conviction is easier – and justified -- after a term is up. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=get_over_it Around the same time, Congressman Dan Burton (R-IN) also called for an investigation of Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich. And then-Senator Don Nickles wanted to see Clinton's pension and other benefits cut.

More significantly, Detroit College of Law professor Brian Kalt argues in a March 1st, 2001 column how a Clinton post-term impeachment could be justified by constitutional history  http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/pardonop3.htm. Kalt makes a fascinating point that English practice, which was the Founders’ starting point, included it. If they had intended to outlaw it, Kalt writes, they would have codified that, since they did explicitly correct several other facets of English impeachment practice for our constitution. Kalt also unearths debate from the Constitutional Convention over impeachment: did congress deserve to remove a president or veep even though terms of office would be limited? The Convention decided Yes--in other words, I think, they seem to have felt all civil officers need to be accountable even if their high crimes or misdemeanors end within 8 years. They placed the urgency of justice in the fore. And if they didn’t think justice should wait for 8 years, how could they possibly have wanted it to wait for a lifetime?

Those who assume, as I had, that only a sitting president can be impeached may recall that Article I, Sec. 3 of the Constitution states “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office.” But that phrase ends with a comma, not a period. The original quote is: “not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States”. (It also goes on to make clear that any civil officer who is impeached could still be “subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment” – criminal prosecution. Probably few people who’ve called for Bush’s impeachment would oppose that! But criminal prosecution will be a lot harder to instigate if Congress continues to pretend that everything Bush has done is legal. Prosecutors would be unlikely to feel they have as much power as Congress.)

Disqualifying Bush from post-term perks – like the honorific “President” in front of his name, maybe? – is not revenge, it’s justice. And it’s taking precautions against One Who Cannot Be Trusted. I personally don’t want Bush going abroad as any kind of ex-presidential ambassador; he wouldn’t have Jimmy Carter’s altruistic intentions. It would probably be too hard for Bush to give up scheming like he did with the Brits to lure Hussein into shooting at aircraft painted in fake UN colors.  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/international/europe/27memo.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin And if he gives speeches in the U.S., I don’t want the Secret Service to enforce ‘free speech zones’ (i.e. perimeters of non-free speech) for him. Since he’s never had much of a work ethic, he’s probably not going to want another federal office like William Taft did—Taft was Chief Justice after the presidency—but we should never underestimate what lucrative or influential job title he and his buddies might finagle, nor overestimate how much work he would believe any post would entail. Besides, it would just be a tremendous boost for how America is perceived if we formally recognized that he is not fit to hold federal office. And after he’s swindled Americans out of trillions for the war and trashed the economy, does he deserve a pension?

Alan Hirsch, a constitutional scholar and J.D. from Yale Law School, per the website for his book A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment, also believes that a president’s departure from office does not mean he can no longer be impeached. http://essential-book.org/books/impeach/#nine He and law professor Kalt both separately cite the precedent of the 1876 impeachment of General William Belknap, the only Cabinet member to be impeached by the House. (So far. Hear that, Rummy and Condi? So far.) Belknap was Secretary of War until he resigned a few hours before the House was to debate articles of impeachment. He was accused of accepting a bribe. (Ah, how innocent the crimes of yesteryear seem.) He was impeached by the House anyway. Unanimously. Note the absence of the partisanship those blocking Bush’s impeachment keep warning against -- it’s amazing what happens when you actually air the evidence. The impeachment (which equals an indictment) moved onto the Senate for trial. The majority of the Senate did not think the Secretary’s resignation got him off scot-free: they voted 37-29 to hear the case. Then came the trial. He was acquitted - by my math, to get the 2/3rds required to convict, they would have needed 44 votes. But to an entire House and 56% of the Senate, leaving office was not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

And why should it be? Kalt notes that scholars during the Nixon era believed he could have been tried even after he resigned. And Jon Ponder argues if he had been, that might have deterred Bush and Cheney. (After all, deterrence is one of the reasons we have a criminal justice system.) Imagine if the Enron principals had left to head up Halliburton, and that erased all responsibility for previous fraud. Or to use an analogy even Bill O’Reilly should like: imagine if a camp counselor molested a child but, because camp was only two weeks, the authorities just said in Sept., “well, what’s done is done.”

Now, there’s always the risk that Bush could be tried and then acquitted. Well, he’s a free man right now – and the country is not – so it wouldn’t be a step backward. It would at least revive a little public faith in Congress. And the Republicans, if they are to teach us anything, should teach us that the odds don’t need to stop anyone. They didn’t care about the odds or even the polls when they impeached Clinton. This time, the polls are on the other side: Bush is so unpopular he was even a liability at the RNC. Moreover, the case against Bush is completely different. The proof is overwhelming - if only the Democrats would stop fleeing it.

The trial itself would be a huge event. The media would carry the proceedings live. People who’ve been out of the loop (because they don’t follow alternative media) would hear the damning facts for the first time. As Joy Behar said to Pelosi on The View: impeachment would mean“that the world and America can really see the crimes that [Bush and Cheney] committed.” And that, regardless of prosecutorial outcome, would be a victory for Truth. After 8 years of being trampled, Truth deserves a hand up.

HEALTH ADVISORY: Invasion of the Impeachophobes

This article was originally published on OpEdNews.com on Saturday, June 21, 2008:

IMPEACHOPHOBIA:

Malignant disease, fiercely contagious. Destroys congressional Democrats' natural defenses against tyranny. Begins as a weakening of the spine. Soon clear vision is lost, followed by coherent speech, rational thought, and, eventually, all ability to stand up. The virulent Pelosi Pathogen seems to be the root.WARNING: Impeachophobia can be extremely fatal for those impacted by the patient's decision-making. The patient's illness may lead to death of U.S. active-duty forces, Iraqis, Lebanese, Iranians, as well as New Orleanians, Midwesterners, Chinese, and polar bears. Traditional forms of treatment, which consist of appealing to the heart, have proven completely ineffective. Some experimental remedies involve administering shocks to the gluteus maximus, known in laymen's terms as "campaign pocketbooks", but this approach requires broad public awareness and support. Meanwhile, research into antidotes has uncovered a promising substance, sanfranciscomide cindysheehanide, which tests show, if injected directly into the 8th district of California, could eradicate the Pelosi Pathogen at its source. However, the vaccine will not be ready until November.

Epidemiology of the disease:

The first noticeable signs of the Pelosi Pathogen appeared in 2006, when the original sufferer was heard to murmur "Impeachment is off the table." Since this was akin to a police officer vowing "We do not arrest criminals", or a bank manager declaring "Come on in, the safe is open", a loss of oxygen supply to the brain may have been involved. After all, medical detectives attest, at that time it was well known that the White House had committed crimes against humanity, violations of the constitution, betrayals of oaths of office, and acts of tyranny. Some Republicans, such as Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. Chuck Hagel, even expected the Dems to put impeachment on the table.

And the Dems have been repeatedly handed Republican critiques of Bush/Cheney's conduct on a platter. Ronald Reagan's associate deputy attorney general, Bruce Fein, came out many months ago in favor of impeachment and even co-wrote a play on it, which ran in Nancy Pelosi's district. John Dean, former counsel to Nixon, wrote back in 2004 that Bush Admin. offences were Worse than Watergate. Paul O'Neill, Bush's former Treasury Secretary, opposed Bush's failure to halt al-Qaeda funders, objected to the White House's economic recklessness and its blackout on Treasury's findings, and also exposed, in his 2004 book, Bush's predetermination to attack Iraq despite its irrelevance to 9/11. Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke exposed the same predetermination in his own memoir that year.

In 2006, the Homeland Security Dept. cut anti-terrorism funding by 40 % for New York City because of a lack of  "national monuments or icons". Republican congressman John Sweeney charged that the Admin. had "declared war on New York", and GOP colleague Peter King called for Secretary Michael Chertoff's resignation. The same year, the all-GOP House Select Committee on Katrina (boycotted by Dems for fear of whitewashing) issued a report which called Katrina "a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," and which member Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) summarized as "very tough on the president, ... very tough on the Department...a blistering report." Though Dems won both houses in Nov., Chertoff retained his post, and Bush was never charged with any crime for his delays in releasing federal disaster resources, or for pretending not to have been warned about the levees.

This year, after the story broke of the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes, former GOP governor Thomas Kean, Chair of the 9/11 Commission, co-wrote a Jan. New York Timesop-ed with his Democratic Vice-Chair Lee Hamilton complaining that "no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations". Kean and Hamilton baldly concluded: "We call that obstruction." In Nixon's era, obstruction of justice was considered impeachable. But the Pelosi Pathogen seems to destroy former standards, like justice. On June 20th, former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan testified to the House Judiciary Committee that Cheney, Karl Rove, and others are withholding information from the public on who leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. Another case of obstruction. McClellan also accused the White House of "packaging" intelligence and misleading the public on the war. Deception to lead the country to war would seem to be the very crux of what the Framers had in mind by "High Crimes"; but it doesn't seem that way to Impeachophobes.

Prognosis:

Once infected, patients become increasingly listless, unable to lift their arms to vote to stop funding a war ¾ of the U.S. opposes. Nor can they close Guantanamo. Nor can they say the four words: "No War on Iran". They even lose the self-preserving ability to ensure that voting machines be hacker-proof.           

The infected become cavalier about whistleblowers' sacrifices. For example, the decorated Major General Antonio Taguba, former Deputy Commanding General, submitted a damning report on Abu Ghraib abuses in May 2004, and was subsequently reassigned to the Pentagon, then later instructed to retire. Though this year it was established that Abu Ghraib-type methods were approved by Bush and Cheney, and though Taguba's preface to D.C.-based Physicians for Human Rights' new report affirms "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," yet the Impeachophobes leave Taguba hang out to dry, and refuse to allow Dennis Kucinich's articles of impeachment against either Bush or Cheney to be debated.           

Meanwhile whistleblower Babak Pasdar, a computer security expert who worked for a wireless giant, revealed this spring that the system he saw allowed a third party to access all phone calls, emails, textings, and website viewings of any client. Instead of following that up, the House just gave telecoms retroactive immunity from lawsuits. Thereby demonstrating a will to actively stand in the way of legal redress by citizens stepping up to do the work Congress has shunned (defending the 4th Amendment). In this trampling on citizen attempts to bring to light White House law-breaking, we see a marked progression from the disease's passive phase to an active, malicious stage.

The Center for Disease Control should screen Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (forget 2007's "Invasion") for clues to the spread of contagion. Before Pelosi became Speaker, experienced Rep. John Conyers, Jr. authored a resolution for an inquiry into grounds for Bush's impeachment. A few dozen congresspersons co-sponsored. Conyers also published "The Constitution in Crisis," a 302-page book of Admin. violations with an unwavering sub-title: "The High Crimes of the Bush Administration and a Blueprint for Impeachment". Yet when Conyers became Judiciary Committee chair, suddenly he started talking about "other priorities".

In Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (1978), a Chinese launderer desperately asks Donald Sutherland for help because his wife seems "wrong", "not right", "different". But a few scenes later, the man asserts creepily: "She much better now". When people start talking about "other priorities", or how Bush is just "an unpopular president who can't do much more damage"...this may be a sign they've already succumbed to the disease.

Watch out for the pod people.

BROADCAST FAILURE: the ABC Debate

This article was originally published on OpEdNews.com on Saturday, April 19, 2008:

For once, the abysmal quality of the mainstream media has been noticed by the mainstream media itself. April 16th’s Democratic debate met with such public outcry – an open letter to ABC signed by 41 journalists and media analysts, thousands of furious emails on ABC.com, 200,000 signatures on MoveOn’s petition - that The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today.com, NPR online, and even ABC World News actually covered the firestorm. This may be some kind of wake-up call, at least to ABC. They had certainly been oblivious to their responsibility to the public before this furor. Not even the shouts and groans from the live audience at the debate (captured in a videoclip on Huffington Post) had clued them in by the next morning: George Stephanopoulos cheerily recapped the debate on Good Morning America as if his pointless questions had been very informative, and on The View, Barbara Walters praised Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson’s “strong questions” and suggested that not a lot of people had heard such questions before. (Both shows are on ABC.)

In typical Hillary Clinton campaign fashion, both the campaign’s first statements and her own public ones after the debate ignored the true nature of the complaints about ABC. On Friday she tried to paint the moderators’ questions, so widely perceived as sensationalistic and trivial, as simply “hard questions”, and warned: “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." This after the first 45 minutes of the debate were conducted in such a way that the moderators peppered Barack Obama with Fox News-style questions using lowest-common-denominator, inflammatory terms like “the flag”, “loves America” and “patriotic” – and then considered they were being ‘fair’ because they gave Clinton equal time to ‘respond’…to the charges against Obama! Stephanopoulos even seemed to want to make up for the fact that the Democratic Party had rebuffed FOX’s 2007 offer to host a debate (a rebuff based on FOX’s smear campaign against Obama). He asked a question on Ayers that, though uncredited, was literally straight from the mouth of FOX’s Sean Hannity, who had fed it to him on air the day before. (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/17/steph-hannity-audio/).

But in truth it might have set some kind of precedent if ABC had actually askedgenuinely ‘hard questions’. In ABC’s Democratic debate of Aug. 2007, Stephanopoulos, after repeatedly by-passing lower-ranking candidates, made sure all candidates on stage (8 of them then) answered a pressing question sent in from Utah: “Do they believe that, through the power of prayer, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Minnesota bridge collapse could have been prevented or lessened?” Unsurprisingly, they all replied something about the importance to them of spiritual values. And having taken up so much time with that vital question, there was no time to ask a question about how to verifiably lessen or prevent disasters like Katrina by actually fighting global warming!

Nothing has changed in Stephanopoulos’ world since then, although an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Northern Ireland has broken off in our own. There were still no questions about global warming on April 16th. Not even a question on how the candidates might heed the Pentagon study (from 2004) on the vast climate change threat. Not even when the candidates were pressed on Pentagon leaders’ authority re. national security.

The networks are in lock-step in their silence, though: the League of Conservation Voters monitors the questions the top 5 political reporters have asked presidential candidates in debates and interviews since Jan. 2007, and out of over 3,200 questions, Stephanopoulos, Tim Russert (NBC), Bob Schieffer (CBS), Wolf Blitzer (CNN), and Chris Wallace (FOX) have asked only a total of 8 questions between them mentioning climate change (http://whataretheywaitingfor.com/facts.html).

Instead of the silly questions “do you think he can win?” and ‘can she win?’, which it was easy to predict the answers to, a question with actual substance could have been: “what integrity do the coming elections have when Diebold and other voting machines used in much of the country can be hacked into to change the national counts?” (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/144431/us_presidential_election_can_be_hacked.html)

And on the subject so belabored Wednesday, ‘fighting the Republicans’, could they not have moved the candidates away from the rhetorical to the practical with: “Considering the fact John Kerry told author Mark Crispin Miller he thinks the 2004 election was stolen, and many, many others contend the 2000 election was stolen, would you fight for a recount if you lose? If the public elects you, will you make sure their wish is honored?”

How about a question on holding the Bush Administration accountable for its 935 lies on Iraq, and its current lies on Iran? Instead, Stephanopoulos told his own lie, that Iran was continuing its “nuclear program” (by which he meant weaponry, not civilian power, though the National Intelligence Estimate says he’s wrong). Then he grafted this to another false assumption, that Iran has ever expressed any desire to attack Israel.

Likewise, Gibson used false conservative talking points about the effectiveness of capital gains tax cuts to badger Clinton and Obama on taxes, while neglecting other questions on the economy such as: unemployment, the deficit, the privatization of natural resources, the specter of a depression, and how about that gap between the rich and poor?

And why no mention of recent revelations that Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft, and even Powell sat in on meetings to plan torture? Gibson had, after all, introduced the debate with: “Much has happened in [the last] six weeks, and there is much to discuss”. But apparently he was just referring to things like Obama’s “bitter” remarks.

Yet despite their intense concentration on such supposed scandals, neither moderator asked Clinton how she could claim both that Obama’s remarks on people clinging to religion trivialize faith, and that she’s outraged by Obama’s loyalty to and respect for his church. I guess that might have been a ‘hard question’ for ABC and the media itself.

The media was the message on April 16th, and it was loud enough for many people hitherto unaware to hear the distress call.

The Gender Card

Originally published on OpEdNews on April 18, 2008.         

Earlier this year, Clinton supporters like Geraldine Ferraro, Gloria Steinem, Saturday Night Live alumnae, contributors to a Newsweek special issue, and some email petitions decried a sexist bias against Hillary in the media. Ferraro went on Fox several weeks after she supposedly left the campaign and used the occasion of Randi Rhodes’ comedy routine to again defend her own statement that had gotten her into hot water; she defended herself by accusing the Obama campaign of “playing the race card”. But in the process of lamenting the inequity between the way the two campaigns are received she herself was playing the gender card.

It’s true that after Hillary got teary in New Hampshire the ludicrous question of her emotionality saturated the media. But what that news cycle showed was that she is savvier about the media than some feminists fear. She did win that primary.

Clinton’s sniper fire gaffe is not something she can blame the media for; unless rising from its usual lethargy and actually researching something a politician said is an example of bias. But it does show that she thought it was sound media strategy to align herself with an image of war. It also underlines how the junior senator from New York wants liberals to see her as against the Iraq war while she tries to be militaristic for the right-wing.

As we all know, Clinton voted in 2002 for the war on Iraq while Obama went on public record opposing it. She has tried very hard to claim Obama’s stand against the war doesn’t count. It may have surprised her that the war became so unpopular that this difference between them actually seemed to mean something, especially to the young. She has repeatedly undermined Obama’s early anti-war position by unsmilingly joking that it’s her “lifetime of experience” and McCain’s “lifetime of experience” versus Obama’s “speech he made in 2002.”

In so doing, she undermines the stand any of us who opposed the war took in 2002 – or 2003, or since – whether it was a speech, a protest sign, a letter to Congress, or more. She has never explained why she couldn’t tell that the Bush Administration was lying even though millions of us worldwide could. She has not explained why she, supposedly so tough and so savvy in D.C. ways, saw nothing fishy in any of the administration’s 935 false statements about Iraq in the two years after 9/11. Perhaps we ordinary citizens, armed with internet access to public information, had greater resources than she did and knew things she couldn’t: that Bush made claims about an IAEA report on Iraq that were publicly contradicted by the IAEA the next day; that intelligence officials expressed disagreement on various of the Administration’s allegations before the war; that former UN inspector and ex-marine Scott Ritter was sure he and his team had thoroughly and permanently destroyed Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons after the Gulf War.

Even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and accept her argument that Bush tricked Congress into thinking they were just supporting a resolution to give him power to force U.N. inspections—and he did try that ruse—the truth is she also voted against the Oct. 2002 Levin Amendment, which contained a clause for “a new resolution of the United Nations Security Council” before a move to disarm Iraq. That would have kept Congress in charge of authorizing war. But it seems this ‘tested’, ‘ready’ candidate who says she’s the best to stand up to Republicans didn’t care to stand up during that test. (Her presidential campaign statement on this vote blames "the language of the Levin Amendment” as if it “would have made it the law of the land that the President could not act without Security Council approval.” Yet the amendment clearly stated the opposite by reiterating the U.S.’ right to self-defense. As does international law anyway.)

She has spent years trying to distance herself from her vote to authorize military force, but without going as far as Obama has in condemning the war. In Dec. 2006 she told ABC News “if we knew then what we know now there wouldn’t have been a vote”—implying that it was all a mistake, and perhaps that Bush would never have sought the authorization if he’d known there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Yet she made this excuse over a year and a half after “the Downing Street memos” were published in The Sunday Times (U.K.) on May 1, 2005. It’s very unlikely that Hillary was still unaware so long after their publication that memos of secret meetings between the Brits and the White House, several months before Congress’ vote on Iraq, revealed that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” to invade. She certainly should have understood the significance of the July 23, 2002 memo which briefed the Prime Minister on the U.S. plan: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” And she should have grasped that the lines in the memo which read “But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran” were clear evidence that Bush already ‘knew then what we know now’.

She tried to stress once again, in the April 16th debate in Philadelphia, that she thinks she can fight the Republicans better than Obama can. Oh, when will she start? The DNC’s own website catalogues numerous allegations of improper relations between McCain and a variety of lobbyists – potentially powerful financial and political scandals – but does Clinton care? She praised McCain again at the debate on ABC, calling him ‘formidable’; while critiquing Obama’s associations with Rev. Wright and William Ayers under the cover that this is what “the Republicans will be raising.” When will she raise Democratic objections against them instead of Republican objections against a Democrat?