BARNEY DOESN'T HAVE FLEAS BUT MY OTHER DOGS DO

"Announcing open hunting season on all Iranian visitors to Iraq is like playing Frisbee with nitroglycerin. Bush has gone looking for trouble and is likely to find it."
Juan Cole

I'm

Scratchin'

&

Rove's

Scratchin'

Alberto's

Scratchin'

&

(It's not cat scratch fever

Either.

Who let the dogs

Out?)

My dogs of war attacked

Iraq

And now Iraq's

Scratchin'.

No WMD and no Al-Qaeda

But

I gave 'em my

Shock & Awe

Anyway!

Citizen's got Spied on

&

Citizens got Lied on

&

Now citizens are doing their

Scratchin'!

A lot of Lies got told

&

A CIA spy got Exposed

&

Now Truth's

Scratchin'!

The Whole World begged for

Peace

But I gave 'em

War

&

Now the World's

Scratchin'!

Barney doesn't have

Fleas

But my other dogs

Do!

&

We're

All

Scratchin'!

Scratchin'!

Scratchin'!

Oh!

I almost forgot my wonderful

Dick!

He's Scratchin'

Too!

"We the American people would not do what George Bush and Richard Cheney have done in Iraq, all of it in our name. We would not, for utterly fabricated reasons, invade and occupy a sovereign country without provocation, killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens, driving millions more from their homes as refugees, torturing prisoners, destroying the country's economy and infrastructure, fomenting a vicious sectarian civil war, sacrificing 3,200 American lives, squandering half a trillion dollars, dangerously destabilizing the Middle East, blackening our country's character, and defaming every American citizen.
We are not a devious, savage, and warlike people. With considerable merit we think of Americans as honest, decent, and law-abiding, generous, tolerant, and humane. And we are patriotic, devoted to our country and to its ideals of freedom, democracy, peace, justice, and honesty in government.
The huge disconnect between who we are and what our government is doing in Iraq is painfully apparent, and the gap is insuperable.
It is imperative, therefore, that we hold the President and Vice President accountable not only for breaking domestic and international laws, but for violating the ethical and institutional essence of America and the ideals of her people. To rescue our country's elemental decency and to assure the security of its governing principles, it is our patriotic duty to impeach George Bush and Richard Cheney.
We consented to the invasion of Iraq because history told us we could trust our government to tell the truth. We were not naïve: the Vietnam war was also launched on a fabrication, but that was an aberration. We would not and did not expect it to be repeated. So we trusted and believed George Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell when they spoke to us. They said Saddam Hussein was complicit in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. They said he had terrifying weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them to our shores. They said he could soon trigger a nuclear device in our country, killing hundreds of thousands of American people.
None of this was true. It was propaganda, intentionally designed by the White House Iraq Group to mislead the Congress and the American people. That is fraud, and fraud is a crime. Given the magnitude at which it was practiced, and the epic consequences, few would disagree: it is a high crime and misdemeanor. We need to impeach Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, as Elizabeth de la Vega has written, not as a matter of politics but as a matter law.
Brilliantly and knowingly, the Bush Administration introduced full-strength surrealism into our public discourse, in the form of their amorphous and fraudulent "global war on terrorism." They asked for our consent and the consent of the Congress to undertake it; thoroughly deceived, both the public and Congress acquiesced. There was no way a trusting country could know the "war on terrorism" was a fantasy: what the Bush Administration launched in fact was an international crime of military aggression.

At least six books make compelling cases for impeachment: The Impeachment of George W. Bush, by Elizabeth Holtzman and Cynthia Cooper; The Genius of Impeachment, by John Nichols; The Articles of Impeachment, by the Center for Constitutional Rights; Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney, by Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips; The Case for Impeachment, by David Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky, and U.S. v Bush, by Elizabeth de la Vega. Tallying an overwhelming succession of impeachable offenses, all fraudulently disguised as worthy, even noble initiatives, the books tell the astonishing story of what the Bush Administration has done. "

From The Remedy is in Our Hands
Impeachment and Patriotism
By RICHARD W. BEHAN
March 20, 2007

[Richard W. Behan is the author of Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands /Island Press, 2001]