When I joined the army and when I reenlisted five times, I did something that every member of Congress does. I took an oath to defend the Constitution as the core commitment of my service. Then the army sent me to eight different conflict areas to attack, or assist others in attacking, people who were not even remotely the enemies of the Constitution. Oddly enough, that oath said I was obliged to "defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic."
I'm retired now; and since I got out of the army I've had more opportunities to oppose the domestic enemies of the Constitution, because they are mostly those who were or worked for my former Commanders-in-Chief. I was employed by scofflaws from Nixon through Clinton (Clinton violated the UN Charter when he bombed Yugoslavia... the US is a signatory, therefore the Charter has the force of the Constitution).
Yesterday, Congressmember Dennis Kucinich fulfilled his duty according to that oath by listing articles of impeachment before the House of Representatives that detailed the serial and blatant Constitutional violations by our current President. Kucinich made a prima facie case, but that's not news to anyone with an attention span greater than a goldfish.
What's news is that Congress is obliged by their primary duty -- to which they took a solemn oath before God -- to defend the Constitution; and that means voting to impeach anyone who has blatantly undermined it at every turn. The reason only a handful of Democrats will do so is that the Democratic Party leadership -- which has enabled the Bush administration at every turn by refusing to take action or even investigate most of these crimes and misdemeanors -- is more interested in winning elections than they are doing their sworn duty.
Today, Congress will refuse to even hear these articles of impeachment.
The popular wisdom -- wrong in my opinion, but that's beside the point -- is that making Bush a defendant will vector in sympathy and hurt Democratic chances in November. So... winning elections --not part of their oath -- has priority over doing their Constitutional duty.
While Democrats have played out this cynical strategy, the US government has continued to kidnap and torture people, kill, wound, harass, and displace millions of Iraqis, Afghans, etc... but that human misery and those rivers of blood don't mean jack-shit to the leadership of the Democratic Party, because they have A Strategy. To them, these horrors only represent an opportunity... let Bush run free, give him enough rope... and don't think about whose being water-boarded, or gunned down by some macho lunatic with Blackwater, or being raped then shot, or watching their parents slaughtered in front of them, or of the caskets that keep showing up at Dover, or of the limbless, disoriented legions of twnety-somethings now moving among us.
Kucinich will be portrayed as peculiar, just as John Brown was painted crazy; but history and a just God that watches these Democratic Party operators wipe their cushioned asses with this oath to win an election will see things through a different lens.
They will be seen for the cheap con-artists that they are; and they have blood on their hands.
Moreover, until now there has been no attack on Iran because it makes no sense to do so. Such an attack will cost the US a broad tactical defeat in Iraq and the consolidation of nascent counter-US blocs around the globe... but if the numbers come in by September-October that show McCain to be the dangerous dolt that he is -- the "hero" whose heroic act was being shot down while he rained bombs on Vietnamese -- that McCain doesn't have a snowball's chance, then the absurd fantasy that the Bush administration will attack Iran -- with all its profound consequences for the US's malignant but profitable position and influence on the world stage -- then... the administration could commit the last spiteful act. They could broaden their little, lost war to include Iran, and leave the new Democratic administration and freshly minted, bloody-handed, instrumental, oath-breaking, Democrat-controlled Congress with a swarming hornets nest of unpredictable and inextricable relations.
And some of us will say, you had opportunity after opportunity to stop this; but you enabled George W. Bush. You protected him and his coterie, because your elections were more important to you than either your oaths or the lives of countless human beings.
Shame on you all.