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Persons of the Day

JULY 5, 2007
The Living Independence Day.  The feeling here is that we have reached a kind of tipping point.  For weeks now it has been clear that Bush/Cheney have lost conservative support.  Now, at last, Liberals are finding freedom.  The Liberal Press are at last letting loose after 6 years of carefully parsed critiques of The Group Home .  We now see spades being called . . .spades. A straight flush.  Three very telling very recent examples:
Eleanor Clift, longtime media fixture, writing about Victor Gold, longtime Republican fixture in Newsweek:  He calls Bush, “President Dodo.  “He’s playing the role of president, strutting around.  He’s the weakest president in memory.”
Rick Hertzberg, usually the toughest mug at the New Yorker, in this week’s Talk hunts with live ammo:
  “(Cheney) has been the most influential public official in the country . . . and his influence has been entirely malign.  He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable “war on terror.”
Keith Olbermann, the least inhibited of all Bush critics, on Tuesday, in the holiday spirit, went, in the context of politics, all the way.  This was addressed to Bush:
“Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency.  And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment.

“It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of non-partisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history.  Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign

Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them—or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them—we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time—and our leaders in Congress, of both parties—must now live up to those standards which echo through our history:  Pressure, negotiate, impeach—get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

For you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.
© 2024 Steve Brodner