"My faith in the Constitution is Whole ..."

The most amazing and moving aspect of this to me has always been less what she says and more who she is to say such a thing.  This is an African-American woman born in extreme poverty who clawed her way into law school and becoming the first African-American woman in the Texas Senate.  She tolerate vicious, profane attacks on her personally but never backed down or sank to their level.

She sat as a legislator surrounded by the descendants of the slavers who tortured and murdered her ancestors, her people.  Some of her colleagues, especially in Texas, had probably participated in lynchings of black people, and definitely participated in Jim Crow-era abuse and discrimination.

Yet she rose above it all to begin impeachment hearings on Nixon by declaring her faith in the very document that allowed and justified that slavery, that torture, that discrimination.

Crook and Liars: 

The Great Missed Opportunity

Like Digby, I was 15, and I remember it and the consequences the same way:

I didn't experience euphoria.  I was stunned though. Seeing the most powerful man in the world brought low by his own hubris (and psychic wounds) was an early lesson in human nature. A real life greek tragedy in front of my very eyes.

Perlstein said something very interesting yesterday on MSNBC. He pointed out that all of this was really a very fine moment for America.  The system worked.  The leaders of our nation were able to come to a consensus about something gone very wrong and rectify it.  It began a period of national self-reflection, a reckoning of sorts with the dark side of our power which had been sorely abused in the post war world. It was painful and difficult but as a nation we were facing up to ourselves and attempting to make adjustments in order to live up to our ideals. We were maturing as a country.

And then along came Reagan with his happy horseshit about American goodness and patriotism, giving excuses for everything, assuring the citizens that we could do no wrong. He infantalized us, making it impossible for America to become a truly mature nation able to face its own past and deal responsibly with its immense power around the globe. You know, actually be the "exceptional" country we like to pretend we are today.

This was a big moment, one that could have truly changed the trajectory of our nation in a positive way.  But apparently we just couldn't face up to what we were becoming. And so we turned to a man who made us feel like children again.

My very conservative republican grandmother never directly criticized Nixon, for whom she had voted three times. But in 1974, the very early days of Second Wave Feminism, my very un-feminist grandmother took me aside to say this:

"What this country needs is more women in politics, because they aren't corrupt." She was wrong about the second part - Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin are proof of that - but dead right on the first part.

QOTD

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

I’ll say this about Nixon: he was wrong, crooked, and vile in a great many ways—but on his worst day, he was better than George W. Bush.

Obama isn't Bush; He's Nixon

Yes, children: Nixon was the horrible Boogeyman president with which your hippie babysitters used to terrify you into good behavior: "Go to sleep, or Tricky Dick will send the CIA after you!"

He went after everybody who opposed him, which by early 1972 was pretty much everybody in the country with a functioning brain and conscience. His illegal, unconstitutional and inexcusable use of federal government power to terrorize, arrest and ruin the lives of anti-war activists (including veterans), college students, labor unions, liberals and Democrats of all stripes awed even vicious tyrants like Baby Doc Duvalier.

He was forced to resign, but never made to answer for his crimes. Which is why presidents ever since have been free to emulate him.

From the NY Times:

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

Well, aren't we relieved that we elected a president who would never do anything like that?

From Wonkette:

It is still 2006? No, it is 2011! And your mysterious Bush administration Obama administration is concerned about the terrible presence of peaceniks and hippies roaming freely in American cities, because 9/11 was a hippie thing. So what is going on? ‘We just killed that pro-war bin Laden guy,’ Non-Partisan Obama said, ‘so we have to be fair and go after some anti-war activists now.’ There are two sides of the terror coin, after all: the people who want to kill you and the people who dislike the United States being at war all the time. Keep tabs on them both. Hell, just keep tabs on everyone. Everyone is now a terrorist.

Weirdest part: how did the FBI know who to go after when they wanted to perform raids? THEY LOOKED THROUGH OBAMA’S PHONE BOOK. Haha, there is some ironic proof he is a secret socialist terrorist. Some of those targeted are union organizers and activists Obama had contact with in Chicago. Are you sure you want to volunteer for the Obama re-election campaign?

From the Washington Post:

The search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.

The probe — involving subpoenas to 23 people and raids of seven homes last fall — has triggered a high-powered protest against the Department of Justice and, in the process, could create some political discomfort for President Obama with his union supporters as he gears up for his reelection campaign.

The apparent targets are concentrated in the Midwest, including Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise.

It is time to brush up on your Orwell, everybody who can still read, which is no one.

Following up:

In the Diminished Expectations Department, Obama’s Justice Department persecuting Obama-lovin’ leftists for having liberal ideals is one of those things that warrants a very reasonable response like, Eh I’m never voting again and also am going to BLOW UP AMERICA, even though such a response will also result in Obama’s Justice Department persecuting you. But our prize-winning Commenter of the Day notes that we just need to put all of this in perspective, and only then is it appropriate to weep openly and respond to all of Obama’s fund-raising spam with violent rhetoric, which will also lead to Obama’s Justice Department persecuting Obama’s supporters, again, forever.

Prommie writes in the comments to this post about the above-mentioned Nixonian horrorshow:

This is a little bit scary, yes, a tad unsettling, but then you read elsewhere in the news that the Whitehouse has also announced a major initiative to crack down hard on marijuana, the killer weed that is luring so many of our young women into white slavery and destroying the lives of so many young men, turning them into axe-wielding homicidal maniacs, then you realize, Obama has his priorities straight. Wars and conflagrations, double-dip depression, rampant financial fraud and market manipulation, unlimited political propagandizing and electioneering by the billionaire corporatocracy, voter suppression, corruption and conflict of influence even on the Supreme Court, and Obama is going after dirty hippie peaceniks, union organizers, and pot smokers. That’s our Unicorn!

And that’s the Win of the Afternoon! Enjoy Gitmo, Prommie!

Let's remember that it's a presidential tradition to go after peace activists and labor activists. Although Nixon, at least, knew how to win by telling his congressional opponents to fuck off and die.

Barack Milhous Nixon

I know, but bear with me.

tristero at Hullabaloo makes the excellent point that today's Democrats - not the Blue Dogs and DINOs and other corporate cocksuckers like Rahm Emanuel, but actual real Democrats like the members of the Progressive Caucus - are to the right of Richard Nixon.

Nixon was a criminal nutcase who started the whole republican "let's start shitting on the Constitution and see how long it takes people to notice" fad, but he also:

• established the Environmental Protection Agency
• signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts - the original ones
• opened a dialogue and peace talks with an existential enemy that really did have weapons of mass destruction
• instituted wage and price controls
• proposed a "negative income tax" to provide livable incomes to the poor and unemployable.

Name one congressional or White House "Democrat," besides Dennis Kucinich, who would dare suggest such things today.

Face it: Democrats are the new conservatives, and their leader is President Obama.

tristero explains:

Among the most important ways to defeat movement conservatives is to refuse to take their bullshit seriously, even for a moment. In fact, when they are given undeserved influence and respect, as they were in the months before Bush/Iraq, innocent people die.

On the other hand, dialogue with conservatives, genuine conservatives, is not only possible, but something liberals are having right now, every day. A prime example is the intense argument many in the blogosphere are having with the current president of the United States. I'm not kidding or being a smarty-pants: Whatever his personal beliefs, Obama governs as a centrist and even, in some areas, like a conservative. Therefore, it is no surprise at all that it has been very, very difficult to introduce genuinely liberal ideas into this administration, and that Van Jones' resignation is a genuine loss to liberals.

Read the whole thing, because it's a revelation that will lift the weight of the world off your trembling liberal shoulders.

We have to stop dealing with Obama as if he were one of us. We have to see him clearly as the right-of-Nixon conservative he truly is.

Because only then can we stop mourning over liberal "betrayals" that exist only in our imaginations and start the kind of hard-nosed, real-world, practical negotiations that got Nixon's signature on world-changing legislation.

And by practical I do not mean radical wingnut "compromises" with republicans, who have no place in the real dialogue between Obama and liberals. I mean understanding that we have to stake out the furthest-left liberal position imaginable to ensure the eventual compromise with conservative Obama ends up within hailing distance of the actual center.

If we'd stood our ground six months ago and demanded single-payer as the liberal position, instead of letting Obama use even the public option as a bargaining chip, today Rahm Emanuel would be begging the Blue Dogs to vote for the strongest public option as the only alternative to single-payer.

The liberal Democrats who ran Congress in 1969-74 knew exactly who they were dealing with, and negotiated accordingly. So should we.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...

Better Late Than Never

Josh Marshall, Founder of the Talking Points Memo Empire, and one of the most eloquent progressive skeptics on impeachment, appears to finally be coming around.

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn't apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we're moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I'm less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of 'normal politics' is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.

I've been a loyal TPM fan since 2001, when it was a one-man, bare-bones blog, just a few months old. TPM Cafe, Election Central, Horse's Mouth, Muckraker, TPMTv and the staff that keep TPM at the top of the blogging game were not even gleams in Josh's eye.

Yeah, he's always been a little too fond of the DLC line than I liked, but I was thrilled by the reporter's sensibility he brought to his posts - a sensibility now grown into the major-story-breaking hard news of TPMMuckraker.

And for all his DLC apologia, liberals and progressives owe Josh Marshall a permanent debt of gratitude for putting a stop, virtually single-handedly, to The Usurper's 2005 attempt to destroy Social Security.

I thought Josh was wrong when he expressed doubts about the wisdom of impeaching Bush and Cheney, but I respected his logic.

I respect him even more for his ability to consider changing his mind based on new evidence and circumstances.

Nevertheless, I think he's missing one of the strongest arguments in favor of impeachment: Nixon.

Josh is 38, which means he was in kindergarten during Watergate. I was only in high school, but I remember the extreme shock felt by people of all political persuasions when the full extent of Nixon's crimes were laid bare.

I remember the heart-swelling pride in the strength of our political system when Congressional Republicans and Democrats banded together to expose those crimes and demand the president be held accountable.

I remember my father - a third-generation Republican - and my mother, a sixth-generation Democrat - both emphasizing to me that the true lesson of Watergate was that the U.S. Constitution was stronger than any politican, stronger than any president, stronger than any crime perpetrated against it.

And I remember how all that shock, all that pride, all that faith in the Constitution was swept away by Gerald Ford's pardon.

Nixon skated. The man shat on the Constitution, came within a whisker of establishing a police state that put the East German Stasi to shame, and he skated.

The precedent for The Usurper's treason was established.

Reagan and Bush I used it to escape punishment for Iran-Contra (Presidents are above the law.) And the republican freakazoids of the '90s turned it inside-out to impeach Clinton for telling a lie told by thousands of married people every single day (Impeachment isn't a serious Constitutional mechanism; it's a political tool.)

If Nixon had been impeached, or indicted and convicted for his crimes after his resignation, it would have been much harder for Reagan and Bush I to resist Congressional investigation through secrecy and perjury. It would have been much harder for '90s republicans to justify using the Constitutional majesty of impeachment for a fib about sex.

And it would have been damn-near impossible for George W. Bush and Richard Cheney to continue to trample the Constitution for more than five years after a pre-Nixon Congress would have kicked their asses into the dustbin of history.

If Congress doesn't impeach Bush and Cheney - or given the time constraints, indict and convict them after they leave office - it won't matter who's elected president in 2008. It won't matter if Democrats take the Senate and House with 80-percent majorities. It won't matter if the republican party is shut out of every national, state and local election for the next three generations.

If Bush and Cheney skate, an even more dangerous precedent than Nixon's will be set in stone:

The president is King; Congress is a debating club; the judiciary is a joke; the Constitution is as dead as Ozymandias, and The American Experiment is a historical fluke that failed.