Dinhternet

For those of you who didn’t know, Con­gress­man Kucinich (Jimmy’s hero) pre­sented thirty-five arti­cles of impeach­ment against Pres­i­dent Bush on the floor of the House yes­ter­day:

Big news, right? Not really. First of all, Speaker Pelosi has already said she will shut down all attempts to do this. But even if it does get to a vote and the House impeaches Bush, there’s not a chance in hell that a super-majority of the Sen­ate will vote to convict.

But even assum­ing that we can do that, so what? We’ll have forcibly removed a lame-duck pres­i­dent who only had about seven months of power left, any­way. I see lots of argu­ments on the inter­net that Bush needs to pay and that he should rot in jail or what­ever, but they don’t seem to under­stand… that’s not what impeach­ment is. It is merely to remove an offi­cial from office; any pun­ish­ments other than strip­ping Bush of office and pre­vent­ing him from hold­ing office again in the future — such as prison time — would need to come from a crim­i­nal case, which would need to be held separately.

And what will we get for our efforts? A polar­ized coun­try that gets ripped a lit­tle far­ther apart. I wish Kucinich, Wexler, and any oth­ers who sup­port this motion could have brought it up after the mid-term elec­tions, when it would have had more mean­ing. The only pos­si­ble ben­e­fit I could see for remov­ing Bush from office at this point is if he starts yet another war (in Iran, North Korea, or else­where) in the next seven months. And surely even Pres­i­dent Bush can see the folly in that.