Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

I know that a lot of people believe the Representative Kucinich’s recent introduction of articles of impeachment came too late (though of course he has been working towards impeachment for a long time now). However, impeachment isn’t just about removing this individual war criminal from office; it’s about making a promise to ourselves and to the world that this will never happen again. It’s about showing future officeholders that we will not allow them to break our laws and murder many thousands of people. Moreover, even if impeachment were ultimately to fail, at least having the hearings would reveal the truth about what led to the occupation and slaughter in Iraq.

This is why impeachment still matters and this why I’m asking you to sign the official petition in support of impeachment. The majority of congresspeople will only get behind this effort if they believe that their constituents demand it. Most Democrats will only take dramatic action if they see it as a political necessity.

On Tuesday, while I was still buried under a mountain of midterms, Dennis Kucinich attempted to force action on his bill to impeach Cheney, which is, of course, intended as the first step in freeing the US from its current ruling regime. In a vote that might, at first glane, seem backwards, it was the Republicans, not the mainstream Democrats, who helped prevent the bill from being tabled. The standard media spin on this seems to be that the Democrats wanted to avoid a “distraction” and that the Republicans were trying to “embarrass” them.

Not quite.  Let’s really think about this.  The Republicans were bluffing.  They knew that the Democratic “leadership” would find a way to prevent real debate on this bill (in the event, it was a motion to return the bill to committee).  What would really embarrass these Democrats would be a vote that would force them to show outright how little they care about ending the war in Iraq or restoring American civil liberties.  Far from being a distraction, impeachment is one of the few avenues by which the Congress can stop the war (the other being by cutting off funding– which they have also failed so far to do). Furthermore, if impeachment were actually openly discussed, what would be brought out into the open would embarrass the Republican party as well as those Democratic members of Congress who repeatedly gave the administration what it asked for.

Through their bluff, the Republicans have created a situation in which they can argue that the reason the Democrats don’t want to debate impeachment is that they don’t have the evidence to show that impeachment is warranted, which is nonsense as can be seen from the full text of Kucinich’s bill.