David 

It's not the dusty ole Constitutional tool of impeachment we need to dust off.  As it has been said so many times before, getting rid of a single person is not going to do it.  It's the structure that needs fixing.  It's the structure that allows the most suspect, criminally oriented political animals to rise to the top, leaving far behind whatever ethics and morals they might have at one time possessed.

No, the dusty ole tool we need to take down off the shelf and get it all shined up again for use is called the Declaration of Independence, one of the finest documents ever written by the hand of man.  Allow me one small quote and I will stand back and let others absorb the depth of its meaning:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

 I do not call here for a violent revolution but, instead, a revolution of the non-co-operative.  A Gandhi-style revolution of non-co-operation, non-violent civil resistance.  JUST SAY NO - We will not pay your taxes.  We will not work in your factories.  We will not serve in your military.  We will not vote for your candidates.

Here on US Gunboat UK there was a contained blip of impeachment comment at about the time the British troop deaths in Iraq were approaching the one hundred figure. Kind of reinforces what the first commentor said.

This Guardian piece is a loose-cannon comment-styled piece including a chauvinist snipe at the ex leader of the Lib Dem party. It reminds me of the snide comments made in the press at ex-Labour leader, Neil Kinnock's expense.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1705695,00.html

I'm afraid I just did not want to pay up the £1 to get the whole Independent article. But, in the manner of the guardian article, it limits the impeachment debate in its headline to Tony Blair. I guess Jack Straw wasn't really in that room with the head of MI6 and Blair when they were told Washington was going for Saddam and going to fix the facts around that policy. And what of Defence Minister Hoon, and most of Westminster, who went along with the war; and the 'serious' British media...

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article342145.ece

Samir Amin, in his book Obsolescent Capitalism uses the term low-density democracy to capture the essence of Western democracies and their economist, expedient practices, supported - by a compliant media, select commentators and 'experts' given the oxygen of sustained dissemination - as the policy that is the natural and only way forward, in the interests of corporate-driven globalisation. I am wary of citing a Marxian theorist here, but Amin is a subtle analyst of succinct density, who, as an Egyptian, is well aware of the pitfalls of Eurocentric vanguard-party Marxism.

Amin is understandibly fatalistic, but, in my view, the bottom line is that globally educated non-apologist, non-containing grass-roots movements are the only way forward.

There was an interesting program on UK terrestrial tv today looking at the effects of global warming on the amount of fresh water entering the North Atlantic from melting Greenland ice-flows (travelling at twice the speed they were 10 years ago) and flooding Siberian rivers (that dwarf the Mississipi already!). The irony is that a complicit Western Europe, while gearing up slowly for global warming, could be hit by a fresh-water halt to oceanic convection that draws warm currents north.

Western Europe could, ironically and devastatingly, become a frozen continent with ice flows in the English Channel/La Manche. Presumably that's what Blair means when he introduces 'our way of life' tropes into UK political culture in his support for military petrol-head Bush - our manifest destiny is to be very uncomfortably numb!

 

You're absolutely right, David. Still, an impeachment of George would be a very good thing. A step in the right direction, as it were. True, life in the US at large can be very depressing--I'm involved in an anti-war event this weekend, in which the only thing that seems to matter is the 2,000 US soldiers who have died. Even the magnificent Cindy Sheehan seems to know that the "American dead" is her ticket to getting media attention. All my arguments that the next president (a Democrat, obviously, and maybe even a woman) will carry on the on the everlasting American project of world conquest (read Moby Dick) fall on deaf ears. Why are "Americans" so loath to admit that the US system massacres hundreds of thousands, millions, and have done so since 1787 if not earlier? It's not as if the historical record doesn't exist. Given this miserable fact of US life, the poetic justice of Bush impeachment is something we should cling to for dear life.